Tapes do not come with the book, October 23, 2000

The text makes reference to an accompanying cassette but all that comes from Amazon is the book. I have sent a fax to the American distributor at 847-679 2494 and an e-mail to the British distributor orders@bookpoint.co.uk but so far no way to get the tape. The British publisher is Hodder and Stoughton Educational 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH The book seems pretty good to me but I haven't been to Turkey yet. It's a tough language.

Would have been higher if the tapes had been there., May 16, 2002

Listen to what your fellow reviewers are saying about this book! Despite what the title says, without tapes, this is in no way complete!

Make sure you ONLY get it if the tapes are available! As far as I can tell, the tapes are no longer available (checking with book distributors such as Baker and Taylor). If you have other good books with tapes, you may find this one helpful, but it isn't top on my list.

I've been teaching myself Turkish (slowly, painfully but I'm old!) for months and was excited to see this one, 7th of the books I purchased on this topic. Wish I'd skipped this one in favor of the last one I bought(which was the best!).

This book is good if you want to be able to take lessons and quizzes (which I do) but is extremely frustrating without the tapes as many of the exercises refer to the missing tapes.

It seems that they tried to make a course book spending as little money as possible. It is full of typos, sometimes they just forget the translation of the introduced vocabularly (e.g. chapter 3 dialogue 2) and you have to look about it at the dictionary. In every chapter, they introduce new vocabulary in exercises as isolated words (e.g. even root verbs!!) instead doing so inside the main text and then they expect that you remember it. The terminology they use when they explaining grammar is a jargon that makes anybody that has finished Middle school very annoyed. Not being unfair, I am at chapter 4 and I've enjoyed it till now, but I will continue with another course book.

Republished with the same errors!, May 4, 2004

A great product to start with, don't get me wrong ... but the publishers really lose all credibility when the same typos appear in the new edition, even though it's been thoroughly rebranded and redesigned.

I bought this book to study when I moved to Turkey. The cassete was absent, but I learned much from this book. I studies just an hour a day, and with the help of Turkish friends, was conversational in the language much faster than I would have without the book. Highly recommend, even without the tape.

Be Careful!, February 17, 2004
Reviewer: A reader
The book description says that the new edition has "2 CD recordings." Alas, the book arrived with no CDs. Apparently this refers to a different edition. I'm returning it--I specifically wanted something with an audio recording, as I understand that the pronunciation is crucial when attempting to speak Turkish.