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>>Thanks to the brilliance of Kemal Ataturk, Turkish uses a perfectly phonetic Latin alphabet. As easy as Spanish to learn to read out loud (even if you don't have a clue what you are saying.) Gives Turks a real advantage in computer work over those who use an Arabic alphabet. Pronunciation not at all difficult. ( providing you can do umlauts <g> ) Grammar is another matter. For example, verb conjugation etc all done with suffixes. Our teachers used to tell us the longest word in Turkish was Cekoslovakyalilastiramadiklaramizdanmidirlar? which means "Aren't there some of those we could convert into Czechoslovians?" Kind of gives you the idea <g> I don't know German but I am told they don't find the concepts as difficult as Americans do.
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>>At least with Spanish you can spit out words in pretty much the same order as English and even if you blow a tense or gender you'll get the idea across. In Turkish it wouldn't even be vaguely comprehensible.
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>>( of course my wife was convinced you could make any English word Spanish by putting an o on the end, so in Spain she would express appreciation of something "cool" with "cool-o" <bg> Got a lot of strange looks. )
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>>I may have you mixed up with someone else, but was your first language English or is English one that *you* learned by total immersion? I've always been in awe of guys like Dragan who are so fluent in English they can appreciate subtleties and puns that even native speakers find challenging. My roommate in college ( a Turk ) was that way with English. Won creative writing contests - in English. ( went on to do rather well at Stanford etc )
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>I have learned English fairly well in the old country (CCCP :)) to the extend that I could give an interview in English to a BBC correspondent the minute I stepped on the Western soil. And I worked as an interpreter, also before arriving to US. But, of course, since most employers in the US do not speak Russian :), I had to really work on improving my English over the 30+ years I live here

How's your Russian now? My old roommate married an American girl from Dayton OH and she has lived in Turkey for 30 years. When I visited them I was amused to see she now speaks English with a Turkish accent <g> Another friend, a girl from Minnesota went off to live in Australia and when she called me ten years later she sounded like Crocodile Dundee.