Explained in English · 3000 spoken Turkish words · audio stories with the meaning under every word · pronunciation practice. Ten minutes a day is enough.
Bubixo → Turkish course for English speakers
Bubixo Turkish is a free course for learning Turkish from zero, written for people who have never started — or who started once, stopped, and want to go about it in order this time. Everything is explained in English, and explained by comparison with English: every rule is measured against what you already know rather than translated out of a textbook written for someone else. No sign-up, no email address, no credit card, no app to download — you open the page and begin the first lesson. It all runs in the browser, on any device.
The one genuinely hard thing about Turkish for an English speaker is word order: the verb goes at the end of the sentence. Ben her sabah evde çay içiyorum is, word for word, «I every morning at-home tea drink». That is one rule to internalize. Set against it, look at what Turkish does not ask of you:
That is the frame the whole course is built on. The hard part is the word order, and that is one rule, not two hundred exceptions.
The heart of the course is a dictionary of 3000 Turkish words with their English meanings. They are not a random collection: they are ordered by how often they appear in real speech and split into three tiers — the core (1–1000), the backbone of everyday conversation; the everyday tier (1001–2000), which widens you out into more areas of life; and the advanced tier (2001–3000), which opens up simple texts and news. Tap any word and you hear it in a Turkish voice. Every single entry also carries an emoji, which fixes the picture in your head faster than the translation does.
Search works in both directions, and you can type without Turkish characters: enter «water» and you get su, or type cay — no cedilla needed — and you get «tea». Alongside the dictionary there are 10 card decks holding 120 cards on a spaced-repetition system: first words, numbers, food and drink, people and family, around town, on the move, shopping, time, the twelve verbs that matter most, and the adjectives you cannot do without.
Traffic between English and Turkish has run in both directions for centuries, and the course marks those words in the dictionary with a «bridge word» badge — 170 of them. These came out of Turkish and settled into English:
| yoğurt | → yogurt |
| köşk | → kiosk (originally a garden pavilion) |
| ordu | → horde (the army; the Golden Horde was Altın Ordu) |
| pastırma | → pastrami, by way of Romanian and Yiddish |
| havyar | → caviar |
| şerbet | → sherbet |
| tülbent | → turban, and — through the shape of the flower — tulip |
| kilim · divan · ottoman · paşa · kaftan | → kilim, divan, ottoman, pasha, caftan |
| kebap · döner · baklava · bulgur · humus | → half the menu of your local Turkish restaurant |
And the traffic runs the other way too. Modern Turkish has taken in a large stock of English words and spells them the way a Turkish speaker hears them, which — because the spelling is phonetic — means you can read them at sight: internet, telefon, televizyon, film, müzik, market, futbol, basketbol, tenis, spor, taksi, otel, sistem, program, plan, park, video, kamera, mikrofon, tost, sandviç, hamburger, pizza, tişört, şort, kot. You can already read a Turkish menu and a news ticker. You just did not know it yet.
Lesson 2 also clears up an error that appears in almost every list of this kind: turquoise does not come from Turkish turkuaz. It is Old French for «the Turkish stone» — named after the Turks, not borrowed from the Turkish word — and turkuaz actually came back into Turkish from French. The direction is the opposite of what you will read elsewhere.
The first lesson belongs to the alphabet, and the good news is that the Turkish alphabet is Latin and has 29 letters. It is read exactly as it is written — one letter, one sound, no silent letters, no tangled pronunciation rules. There is no q, no w, no x, and there are six letters of its own: ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü. Two of them you can already hear in German and Scandinavian names, and ç is simply your «ch». What to watch from day one:
Ten lessons that build on each other, put together around exactly the places where English speakers stumble:
Each lesson has an explanation in English, spoken examples and a short five-question test — 50 questions across the course, alongside 131 spoken example sentences.
Six standalone chapters, each with a full explanation in English, a formula card and spoken examples (64 in total):
In the Sentences tab you do the arranging yourself: you see the English sentence and tap the Turkish words into the right order — 120 sentences across four areas and three difficulty levels, each with the rule explained behind it. This is exactly where the distance between the two languages sits: the verb comes last.
12 stories, together 131 lines and 546 word meanings written directly under the words. They were written for the people who actually look for a Turkish course in English: second- and third-generation heritage speakers, partners of Turkish families, foreigners living in Istanbul or Antalya, people who watch Turkish drama with subtitles, and travelers.
In every story the Turkish line stands on its own, the meaning of each individual word sits under it in English, and the full translation runs below the line. You can hide the translation to test yourself, or press «Listen to the whole story»: the lines are read one after another with the current line highlighted, at normal or slow speed.
Words stick better when you play with them. The course has four games drawing on 240 illustrated words across 12 themes: Pick the picture (hear or read, then tap the right image), Memory cards (match picture to word), Order the letters (build the Turkish word from scattered letters) and the 60-second race against the clock. Each game takes two or three minutes.
Yes, entirely. The ten lessons, the dictionary of 3000 spoken words, the grammar chapters, the audio stories, the games and the pronunciation drill are all available with no fee, no trial period, no credit card and no «premium» lock. There are no adverts on the page either.
Up to A1–A2 level, yes, and more easily than you would expect. Turkish is read exactly as it is written (one letter = one sound), and the grammar runs on a fixed system: endings are glued to the stem in a set order, with remarkably few exceptions. The course gives you an English explanation, a spoken example and a short test at every step. For fluent speaking you will afterwards need direct contact with people.
It is different rather than hard. The genuine difficulty is word order: the verb goes at the end of the sentence, and the meanings English carries with prepositions are carried in Turkish by endings. Against that, Turkish has no irregular verbs to memorize, no grammatical gender, no articles, and completely phonetic spelling. One rule to learn instead of two hundred exceptions to remember.
The first thousand most frequent words cover the bulk of everyday speech, two thousand give you a comfortable conversation about your own life, and three thousand open up simple texts and news. The dictionary in this course is built on exactly that logic and split into three tiers of a thousand each.
Yes, and it was written with you specifically in mind. If you grew up hearing Turkish at home, you already have the sounds and a good deal of the vocabulary; what you are missing is the written system and the grammar that connects it. Start at lesson 3 (vowel harmony) if the alphabet is already familiar, and use the stories — several of them were written for exactly this situation.
No. There is no sign-up screen at all: you open the page and start the first lesson. We do not ask for a name, an email address or a phone number.
In your browser's own storage (localStorage), not on a server. So you carry on where you left off on the same device in the same browser, but the progress does not travel to another device by itself. If you clear your browser data, the progress goes with it.
Most of the course is played from recorded audio files. Where a recording is not available, the Turkish speech synthesis built into your browser reads the text instead — so there is nothing to download either way. If you hear nothing at all, your device probably has no Turkish voice pack installed; that is normal and not a fault of the page.
12 short stories from life in Turkey and from the lives of people learning it — a grandmother's kitchen, the first sentence at the airport, at the doctor, a job interview and more. What makes them useful: the meaning of each word sits directly beneath it in English, and the full translation runs under the line. You can hide the translation to test yourself, or have the whole story read slowly. That way you are reading a real text from the first week instead of waiting for «the right level».
The course lays the foundation (A1–A2): alphabet and pronunciation, vowel harmony, the basic tenses, the cases and the most frequent vocabulary. It is a strong starting point before TÖMER or another official language program, but it does not replace a recognized certificate and will not carry you to B2 or C1.
It runs in the browser on phone, tablet and computer. There is nothing to download — opening the address is enough. You can add it to your home screen if you want it to open like an app.
Four longer pages accompany this course, each going further into one part of it than a lesson can:
Bubixo Turkish · A free Turkish course for English speakers · Progress is stored locally in your browser