I want to encourage everyone to check out Özgür Pala's great website, Learning Turkish Online.  It really is a great site and he offors alot for the self directed language learner.  Learning Turkish Online has four beginner, four intermediate and five advanced lessons.  The lessons are really well done.  Each lesson includes an introduction in English which gives you a description of the lesson, what you will learn, tips for the lesson and an estimate of how long the lesson should take you.  They are really focused on comprehension, so questions are all in English.  I love this feature of the site.  Too often, reading comprehension activities turn into an assessment of my ability to figure out what the question is asking and not an assessment of what I have read or listened to.  The lessons are varied as well - some are reading comprehension, some are listening comprehension (watching television clips) and some are both.  Each lesson includes true/false questions, short answer and some dictation exercises.  Ih ave yet to explore the site in detail, but would recomend anyone looking for another arrow in the quiver to visit the site and spend some time working through the lessons.  Thank you Özgür for your excellent resource.  I can only hope that he will continue to expand the site and add more lessons. 

Looking for ways to help friends learning English?  Wikipedia offers a great resource.  Here is how Wikipedia describes the page:

Simple English Wikipedia is a version of the Wikipedia encyclopedia, written in Simple English. Articles in the Simple English Wikipedia use fewer words and easier grammar than the English Wikipedia. The Simple English Wikipedia is also for people with different needs, such as students, children, adults with learning difficulties and people who are trying to learn English.

Does anyone know of sites like this in Turkish for Turkish language learners?

I have updated the Ingilizce Dinlemek page and changed the name to Engish4Turkey.  I think it will be a great site for the exchange of ideas and for Turks to find a good, interesting and fun source of comprehensible input for helping them learn English.  I have also connected this page and that one in the hopes that Turks will come here to record their answers for our narrow listening site on the new Türkler İçin page.  As well, you can shoot over to the Native English Speakers page of English4Turkey to record an answer to one of the questions posted there.  If you are living in Turkey, just add that fact to your introduction.  I think it should be a great place for Turks to go to find good, quality listening material, but it will only be good, if we take the opportunity to share our opinions, values and thoughts to the questions posted there.  Be the first!  Head on over and participate. 

Would you give 60 seconds to help a Turkish friend learn a little English?  To help your Turkish friend learn a bit more about your home culture?  Well, of course it may take a bit more than 60 seconds, but I am excited by the prospects of a new website dedicated to producing narrow listening files for Turkish English language learners to access nd use.  You can be a small part of this by checking out the Native English Speakerpage and contributing a bit yourself. As of now the page is called Ingilizce Dinlemek.  Not too exciting so if anyone has a suggestion for a better name, please let me know.  Kolay gelsin.

The University of Texas at Austin and Brigham Young University have teemed up to produce a fantastic site called Cultural Interviews with Turkish-Speaking Professionals.  There are literally hundreds of short video interviews with Turkish professionals and executives talking about: professional activities, negotiation practices, courtesy, and stereotypes.  The Turkish is very clear, they speak quite slowly and really well.  As a source of narrow listening it can’t be beat.  Everybody is talking about the same topics!  Check it out today!  And a huge thanks to this website for our first real narrow listening files.  We are slowly getting recordings together here, but don’t yet have enough to put a narrow listening file together.  It is coming though!  For now, check out this great site.  Just click on the tabs at the top and then click on the person you want to listen to.  Each video is accompanied by the transcript of what they are saying as well.  Happy Listening!

Our good friends at Turk Telecom have a great website called TT Çocuk where they have a nice collection of animated childrens stories and fairy tales that you can listen to.  Ten stories are in both English and Turkish and there are nine other stories that are only in Turkish.  Listen first in English to get the gist of the story and then go back and listen again in Turkish.  They are well done and the audio is high quality.  I will try and find a place to put a link to the page on the website if there is a positive response to the stories.  Be sure and point your Turkish friends to the site as well as a good source of English for their kids.  And if you have kids, pull one up on your lap and watch together. I had both of mine on my lap this evening.  It's like reading a picture book on the computer.

Stephen Kaufman of The Linguist Method details what he sees as some of the primary benefits and advantages that the internet has to offer language learners. You can read or listen to his helpful article here.  In the article he discusses a number of different things, but what I found most valuable are his thoughts on the primacy of input and the idea of the importance of learning new vocabulary.  It is an interesting article and useful in thinking about how we go about learning languages.  As a note, Kaufman's free language learning program is called Lingq.  It is a great program with something like 12 available languages to learn.  Unfortunately, Turkish is not yet one of them. 

Live Mocha is a great site for learning languages -  36 different languages to be exact, including Turkish.  It is a great site for all levels.  Though I have only just begun to play around with the site it has a structured set of lessons to progressively help you improve your Turkish.  You can upgrade for more help, time with a tutor, more lessons and video downloads.  One great feature is that instruction can happen in your native language - not just English.  This provides better access for our Turkish friends trying to learn English.  Check it out.  It may be just the extra piece of the puzzle you need.  It may be just a good review.  Or it may be just the site your Turkish friends are looking for to learn English.  Let me know what you think. 

PS- click on the Live Mocha icon to go to their site.

If you are like me, nearly everyone you talk to asks you about learning English, how to learn English and if you will teach them English.  Before creating this site, I created another site for Turks, and really for Turkish families, to help them navigate the internet in search of learning sites.  The problem for so many is that the internet is an unending source of sites dedicated to learning English and the vast majority of them are written in . . . English.  Which for many of the parents that want their kids to have more opportunity to learn the language, is no help at all.  The site   www.ingilizceogrenmek.org is written in Turkish and is a basic portal to learning opportunities.  On it they will find links to useful sites with summaries of the linked site and how to use it written in Turkish.  Anyway, it may be something to pass onto your friends and neighbors.  It, like this site is a work in progress.  You can also check out the English version - I wrote it first in English and then translated it into Turkish - at www.english4turkey.com