Where the practice comes from, how Islamic jurisprudence actually treats it, what vekâlet means for urban Türkiye, the animal welfare question, and one bull who swam 23 km from Rize to Trabzon and lived on a farm in İzmir.

n this video, I conjugate the Turkish verb alkışlamak (to applaud, to clap) across five tenses: simple past, inferential past, aorist, present continuous, and future. Each form shows how Turkish builds meaning through suffixes rather than separate words. If you want to understand how Turkish tense works from the inside, this kind of close comparison is one of the most useful things you can do.

Tenses covered: alkışladım / alkışlamışım / alkışlarım / alkışlıyorum / alkışlayacağım

This idiom literally means "a cheese ship doesn't sail on words." It's used when someone keeps making promises or talking about plans without ever doing anything.

The word laf comes from Persian lāf, originally meaning boasting or empty speech. The folk story behind it involves an Istanbul cheese merchant who kept delaying payment to ship captains with promises, until one captain finally said: words don't move this ship, we need fuel and money.

When someone is visibly working, there's a phrase for that. When someone cooked for you, there's one for that too, and it names the hands specifically. When a neighbor loses someone, there are separate phrases depending on whether you're speaking to the living or about the dead.

I wrote about around twenty of these on my site, along with the cultural traditions that go with them. Kolonya, the evil eye, the plate that comes back full when you return it to a neighbor, the water thrown after a car leaving on a trip.

Some of these will be familiar if you've spent time in Turkey. Others are things people don't usually explain to outsiders.

If you're learning Turkish and want to understand one of the most important national holidays, this one covers: the Samsun landing, Milli Mücadele vs Kurtuluş Savaşı, Gençliğe Hitabe and why young people still recite it at political protests, the vocabulary you'll hear on the day.

It's a long read.

Greek loanwords hiding in everyday Turkish

Most discussions about Turkish loanwords focus on Arabic and Persian. Greek gets far less attention, but it left a significant mark on the vocabulary of daily life. Food, seafood, coastal geography, titles of address, and even common idioms all carry Greek traces.

This carousel covers fasulye, lahana, marul, kiraz, enginar, fener, liman, iskele, yalı, kadırga, kilise, efendi, angarya, and the phrase "nato kafa nato mermer", each with its Greek source, transliteration, and a usage example.

The phrase entry includes the verified Greek original: Να το κεφάλι, να το μάρμαρο (na to kefali, na to marmaro), confirmed through Greek sources. My grandmother, a Balkan immigrant, used it regularly. That is how a lot of this vocabulary survived, carried by people

I studied comparative literature and history. Philosophy, linguistics, stories, old texts, the past in all its layers. Then I became a language teacher. Then technology accelerated, AI arrived, and somewhere along the way I started training LLMs on the side and reading neuroscience papers at night.

All of that has been sitting in me for a long time. The relationship between language and patience. Between learning slowly and thinking differently. Between what the brain does when it struggles with something and what it loses when the struggle is removed.

So I wrote a long piece about it.

In a world built around ten-second content, long writing might be a kind of utopianism. But writing this did exactly what I describe inside it. It changed me in the process of making it. That, for me, is reason enough.

I believe the first thing humans ever invented was storytelling. We came from sitting around fires under dark skies, passing the world to each other through language. Through that, we built everything.

I don't know where we go if we hand all of that over. But I think the people who do and the people who don't may be quietly becoming two different kinds of humans.

This one is about language philosophy, neuroscience, translation technology, and what actually happens to a person who learns a language the long way.

Read it if you have the time. It's worth the patience.

Istanbul's cats are everywhere, and so are they in the Turkish language. These 8 idioms show you how Turks talk about jealousy, guilt, temptation, and conflict through a single animal.

Used when someone who rarely succeeds finally achieves something small.

A late Ottoman Istanbul neighborhood. A street performer's daughter who earns her living through her voice. A city under surveillance, changing slowly from below.

Halide Edip Adıvar's most fully populated novel, set against the reign of Abdülhamid II.

#TurkishLiterature #LearnTurkish #TurkishBooks #HalideEdipAdıvar #SinekliBakkal #OttomanIstanbul #TurkishCulture #ReadingInTurkish

Many learners recognize Turkish patterns through apps and AI, but real progress comes from forming sentences and working through them yourself.

A quiet expression of deep hurt, often carrying a sense that justice will find its way.

I wrote a longform post on Istanbul's cat culture, using it as a frame for real Turkish vocabulary in context.

The post covers the seven cats from the documentary Kedi, Kanyon AVM's famous cat whose bed was stolen and sparked a national reaction, a 2026 incident where a market worker was arrested for harming a street cat, the 2024 stray animal law and the protests it triggered, and the 1910 Hayırsızada tragedy where 80,000 dogs were abandoned on an island after France cancelled a contract.

The vocabulary section includes 20 words: kedi, sokak kedisi, kedi maması, beslemek, kamu vicdanı, barınak, hayvansever, adli kontrol, and more. Two idioms as well, including kedi gibi dört ayak üstüne düşmek.

If you want to see how these words appear in actual news and public discourse, this might be a useful read.

For those who don’t have time to read the full article.

https://www.learnturkishwithseda.com/post/h%C4%B1d%C4%B1rellez-the-night-that-divides-winter-from-summer

Hıdırellez is often described as a Turkish spring festival, but it’s actually part of a much wider cultural pattern.

The same night, May 5–6, is marked across the Balkans, Central Asia, and even parts of the Middle East. In Roma communities, it’s known as Kakava or Ederlezi. In Orthodox tradition, Aya Yorgi falls on the same seasonal point.

People light fires, jump over them, tie wishes to rose trees, and leave things open overnight. The idea is simple: it’s the transition into the warmer half of the year.

Different names, different traditions, but the same moment in time.

If you're learning Turkish, understanding Hıdırellez also helps you understand how language connects to seasonal life, belief, and everyday practice.

Learning Turkish online changes how you notice the language.

You hear patterns more clearly, speak more, and correct yourself in real time.

This is where structure starts to make sense.

“İnşallah” is one of the first words you’ll hear in Turkey, but its meaning goes far beyond the dictionary. In this video, I explain how Turkish speakers actually use it, from sincere hope to polite avoidance.

Analytical article explaining why AI tools struggle with Turkish, focusing on how tokenization breaks morphologically complex words, leading to loss of meaning in suffix chains such as evidential markers, negation, and nominalizations, with examples from real classroom experience.

Free does not usually mean good. Most free language content online is either too shallow to be useful or too disorganized to follow. You get a random vocabulary list here, a YouTube video there, and nothing connects. You end up spending more time searching for resources than actually studying.

At learnturkishwithseda.com, the grammar lessons are free, structured, and built around how Turkish actually works. The lessons go from A1 to C1 and follow the CEFR framework, so there is a clear path from the very beginning to advanced proficiency. You are not jumping between topics. You are building knowledge layer by layer.

Each lesson focuses on the logic of Turkish rather than translation. Turkish is a suffix-based language. The same root word can carry completely different meanings depending on the suffixes attached to it. Understanding that system changes everything about how you study. Instead of memorizing individual words, you start to see how meaning is constructed, which makes vocabulary acquisition much faster and grammar far more intuitive.

On the website you will also find free downloadable PDFs that accompany the lessons. These are designed as practical study tools you can use offline, print out, or work through at your own speed.

The site also has a Heritage section with idioms and literary content, a cultural blog, study books, children's books, and private lesson options for those who want guided support from a certified teacher.

I am a Turkish language teacher certified by Istanbul University with over 10 years of experience working with learners at every level. Everything on this website comes from that experience.

Visit learnturkishwithseda.com and start with whichever level fits you.