English spelling is largely historical; it has not kept up with changes in pronunciation, whereas Turkish, since adopting a variant of the Roman alphabet in 1928, has a writing system that faithfully guides pronunciation. Words like "rough" and "thorough," with similar spelling but different sounds, will prove challenging for the Turkish learner of English. The 12-vowel inventory of American English will also prove a challenge for the Turkish learner, whose native language features an eight-vowel system.
Turkish word order is subject-object-verb, with relative clauses coming before the verb, whereas English word order is subject-verb-object, with relative clauses coming after the verb. It will take the Turk a while to get used to this new order.
Turkish verbs are uniformly regular, with only one exception. English has several hundred irregular verbs, including many of the most useful and frequent, such as "eat," "sleep," "go," "do," "have" and "be." The absence of regularity and the different word order will put the beginning learner of English on a steep learning curve.
Turkish words consist of a stem with one or more suffixes. These suffixes carry information such as person, number, case and tense. Agreement in Turkish is much more complicated than in English. Subjects and verbs must agree in person, number, and case, which is marked on verbs with their respective suffixes. In English subject and verb must agree in number (singular or plural). While the English system may seem easy, it will take some time for the Turkish learner to accustom herself to it.
When an English speaker wants to emphasize a particular word in a sentence, she will say that word with more energy, or stress it. In the sentence, "I bought a new car," any single word (except the indefinite article "a") could be stressed to give the sentence a slightly different meaning. This may be hard for the Turkish speaker learning English to acquire. While the rules for stress in Turkish are complicated, they are not related to emphasizing a word. Instead, words can be moved to the front of the sentence for emphasis.