When you travel, you sometimes have financial needs and need to talk to the banka memuru (bank teller) or kambiyo memuru (currency exchange clerk). Some banking terminology:
Çek kartım var : I have a check card
Banka kartım var : I have a bank card
Kredi kartım var : I have a credit card
Amerikan doları : US dollars
ödermek : to pay
para yatırmak : to deposit
para çekmek : to withdraw
This is a fairly grammar-heavy lesson. We learn the genitive case, which consists of adding -(n)ın, -(n)un, -(n)in, or -(n)ün, depending on vowel harmony. Thus 'hotel's' would be otelin. Personal pronouns are similar, although first person pronouns use -im instead. Thus from ben, I, we get benim, my. Possessive pronouns agree in case endings with their nouns (Turkish is very rational in linking pronoun endings to the endings of nouns modified by them): benim bavulum, my suitcase; onun pasaportu, her passport.
We also get the future tense. Ne kadar bozduracaksınız?, from bozdurmak, to change (in the financial sense of exchanging), means "How much will you change?" What makes it future is the -acak- or -ecek- affix that connects the stem with the second-person plural ending.
You could also end up at the postahane, and need to talk to the posta memuru, the post-office clerk. Some post office vocabulary:
mektup : letter
paket : package
adres : address
Posta kutusu nerededir? : Where is the mailbox?
You may also need a telefon. 'To dial' is çevirmek.
If you want to send or call to something, say England, you use the dative case: İngiltere'ye, to England, Londra'ya, to London. If you want to receive something from somewhere, you use the ablative case: İngiltere'den, from England, Londra'dan, from London.
To express duty, necessity, or obligation, you often use a -malı-/-meli- affix. So if you want to say, "We must send this package to London", you say, Bu paketi Londra'ya göndermeliyiz. There are also words like gerek and lazım that will express the same idea as the necessity affix.
And that's just another taste of how Turkish works. Tomorrow, Cuma, the topic is cars and emergencies.
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Tayfun and Gillian Çağa, Conversational Turkish in 7 Days, Passport Books (Chicago: 1992).
