The "Workbook Turkish Subordinate Clauses" is a textbook which gives a thorough introduction to Turkish subordinate clauses (object clauses, subject clauses, and relative clauses), accompanied by extensive material for practice.
The two authors (Rosemarie Neumann, Zühre Sahin-Schmidt) have had many years of experience teaching Turkish in different institutions (community colleges, universities) for variyng audiences (e.g. for healthcare workers - see the textbook "Turkish at the Hospital Bed" of the same publisher), and producing teaching and learning materials.
The way subordinate clauses are formed in Turkish is vastly different from their construction in German. Learners of Turkish therefore need extensive practice material in this area in order to master these structures, targeting both the ability to understand texts and to use these constructions independently. While it is (partly) possible to avoid subordinate clauses when using the language actively, learners will rarely find written texts which contain no subordinate clauses. Without the ability to understand and analyse complex sentence structures, the access to texts is largely blocked, also barring one important way of expanding their grasp of the language independently.
In existing textbooks and grammars of Turkish, the topic of subordinate clauses is either not treated at all or not thoroughly enough. The "Workbook Turkish Subordinate Clauses" is therefore an important addition to existing materials. It is addressed to learners who already have basic knowledge of Turkish, but can be used even with a relatively low level of knowledge. The textbook is suitable for use in class as well as for autodidacts. It is structured as follows:
- Table of contents
- Contrastive descriptions of subject and object clauses in German and Turkish
- Exercises on subject and object clauses
- Contrastive description of relative clauses in Turkish and German
- Exercises on relative clauses
- Solutions to all exercises
The contrastive descriptions facilitate a deeper understanding of the constructions, but are not required for solving the exercises. They also provide useful background information for teachers.
The solutions given make it possible for self-taught learners to work with the book. The exercises build up from easy to more difficult. Each exercise is acccompanied by a list of difficult words to save dictionary lookup time.