I’ve been studying Turkish on and off for over 20years. My partner is Turkish, speaks Turkish at home with his family,friends and I can understand a little. I’ve tried books etc. 4previous times but never really progressed and became frustrated so quickly that I stopped. I’ve even tried DuoLingo and it is cute, but I do not think I will ever use the phrase “The ducks drink milk” as DuoLingo has taught me. 
I’ve been working diligently for about a month now, 1 hour a day and it’s beginning to pay off! Yesterday I watched a cooking show subtitled in Turkish with the sound off and I was able to piece together the dialogue to follow along. My AHA moment was when I was able to understand “don’t burn the bechamel sauce”
Follow Steve’s video and advice because it will pay off. İçi şanslar kardeşimler!
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It does! I’m also learning Turkish (my partner is also from Turkey, though as he’s a Kurd I actually hear more Kurdish than Turkish from him…) and I love being able to use YouTube videos as learning material.
I’m still focussing on input and haven’t really tried to output yet (apart from writing the odd sentence for my partner to correct for me) but I’m amazed at how much I can understand already.
I don’t know if you’ve ever learned other languages, but you’ll have a few ‘aha’ moments along the way. With Turkish, my first was when we were watching a film and my partner asked me what a word (in English) meant. I can’t remember what it was now, but I do remember it was a strange use of the word in the context. Instead of explaining in English as I normally do, or one of us reaching for Google Translate, having LingQ’d a similar word in the recent past I just said the word in Turkish. Amazing feeling.
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Yes, LingQ is great! DuoLingo is good to get you to a couple hundred words, quickly, which help you onboard quickly to LingQ in a given language. However, beyond that, LingQ, supplemented to reading books and listening ( to TV or podcasts) is far better.
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That’s amazing! Best of luck in your studies!
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