The best AI apps to practice speaking Turkish

What you need to practice speaking Turkish

Turkish takes work. In our ranking of 67 languages it’s the 15th hardest for English speakers, at 6,521 effort points. That’s more than twice what Spanish takes (2,941), and more than Russian (6,067) or Polish (6,329). It sits right next to Arabic (6,480).

Some of it is easy. Turkish uses Latin letters, you say each letter the same way every time, and there’s no gender: o means he, she and it. What makes it hard is how words are built, and where they go in the sentence.

• Vowel harmonyEndings change their vowel to match the word. The plural is -ler or -lar: evler, houses, but kitaplar, books. “In” is -de or -da: evde, at home, but okulda, at school. The rule fits on one page. Picking the right vowel without thinking takes practice.
• Words built from endingsWhere English uses a string of words, Turkish stacks endings onto one. Evlerimizden is ev (house) + ler (plural) + imiz (our) + den (from): from our houses. You need to build words like that on the fly, mid-sentence.
• The verb comes lastHer sabah kahve içerim, I drink coffee every morning, is literally “every morning coffee I-drink”. And where English says “to Ankara”, Turkish says Ankara’ya. So you plan the whole sentence before the verb, which feels backwards at first.
• Letters that look familiar, but aren’tTurkish has six extra letters: ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş and ü. The dotless ı is a different vowel from i: kır is the countryside, kir is dirt. Ğ is silent and stretches the vowel before it, so dağ, mountain, sounds like “daa”. And c is said like the j in jam.
• Lots of Turkish you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: Turkish videos, podcasts and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeA language this hard takes hours of talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Turkish. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch Turkish YouTube videos and podcasts, and read stories written at your level. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itKnowing a word isn’t the same as using it, with the right endings, in the right vowel, and the verb at the end. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level.

Brand new to Turkish? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn the basics with Duolingo (free) or Busuu, which both teach Turkish from zero, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Turkish

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: what it means, what kind of word it is, and an example with a translation. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Turkish teachers

Five teachers, all from Turkey. Can from Istanbul, the YouTuber behind Turkishle, so if you already learn with his videos, you can practice with an AI version of him here. Emre from Istanbul too, Aylin and Deniz from Izmir, and Selin from Ankara.

Each one has their own voice. Pick the one you like, and switch whenever you want.

• 
  Aylin Demir

  Izmir · Turkish
• 
  Can Kutas

  Istanbul · Turkish

  Turkishle
• 
  Deniz Kaya

  Izmir · Turkish
• 
  Emre Yildiz

  Istanbul · Turkish
• 
  Selin Arslan

  Ankara · Turkish

Input: Turkish to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Turkish you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to a Turkish YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance.
• Stories written for youRead writes Turkish texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Turkish word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. It checks every word of a video or text against that list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people start Turkish on Duolingo: 4 million learners, it says. Good! So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Langua · Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending