Turkish — Türkçe
You have to know how a Turkish word ends before you can start saying it.
Voice, negation, tense and person stack onto the stem in one fixed order, each vowel chosen by the one before it, and the verb that settles the whole sentence comes last. You are committed to the ending before anyone has heard the beginning. Sessions here make you build those words at speed, out loud, to someone who has to follow them first time.
The decisions Turkish makes you take before the first syllable and confirm at the last.
Suffix chains you cannot revise
Turkish stacks voice, negation, tense and person onto the stem in a fixed order — görüşemedik, yaptırmayacağım. On paper the word can be unpacked afterwards, at leisure. Out loud the order is set by the first syllable, and there is no going back to insert one.
Vowel harmony with no time to check
Nearly every suffix vowel takes its shape from the vowel before it, and the consonants move too: kitap becomes kitabı, ağaç becomes ağacı, -de hardens to -te after a voiceless sound. Silently you get these right. At speed you say kitapı and hear yourself do it.
Participles where English uses who
Turkish has no relative pronoun. The clause is packed into a participle in front of its noun — dün gelen adam, dün gördüğüm adam — so you choose between -(y)An, -DIK and -AcAK, mark the possessor and the case, and know the head noun before you open your mouth.
-mIş, -DI and who told you
Turkish marks how you came by the information. Geldi is something you witnessed; gelmiş is something you were told, or worked out afterwards. Get it the wrong way round in conversation and you quietly claim to have seen things you only heard about.
The slot right before the verb
Word order is loose enough that almost nothing you say is ungrammatical, which is why nobody corrects it. But the position immediately before the verb carries the focus, and anything after the verb reads as old news — so the emphasis lands somewhere you did not mean.
Four Turkish exams that make you finish the word, and then the sentence, out loud.
Length, preparation time and whether there is a person in the room vary from one to the next. Each is set out below as it is actually run, because a task you have rehearsed once costs you far less thinking than one you meet cold.
Türkçe Yeterlik Sınavı (TYS), Yunus Emre Enstitüsü
The speaking session is sat one candidate at a time and runs fifteen minutes: five on a single prompt, with up to a minute to prepare it, and ten on seven interactive questions. The certificate comes at B2 or C1.
LanguageCert AÜ TÖMER TürkYet (Spoken)
A face-to-face interview with an interlocutor who does not mark you, sat separately from the written paper. B1 is twelve minutes in four three-minute parts: personal questions, role-play situations, a discussion from pictures, then a set topic.
Ankara Üniversitesi TÖMER e-YADİS
Computer-based: the questions come off a screen and your answers go into a microphone. One part answers spoken questions; the other gives you a visual or text prompt, one minute to prepare and two to talk.
ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview, Turkish
Twenty to thirty minutes of unscripted conversation with an ACTFL-certified tester, by telephone or in person. It opens gently, then hardens — narrate, suppose, defend, role-play — and the rating is the hardest one you held together in Turkish.
What are you practising for?
Start with ten minutes
Nothing to book, and a written report at the end of the first session.
Try 10 minutes freeNo certificate comes out of this
What a session produces is our own mark, not Yunus Emre Enstitüsü's and not TÖMER's, and nothing is awarded on the strength of it. Read it as an account of how that half hour went. It also assumes the endings are already in there somewhere: if the suffixes have not been learned yet, there is nothing for a correction to catch hold of.