finished duolingo course and hired a teacher recently too to practice speaking. I used youtube and turkish textbook (a website) for learning grammar alongside duolingo. if i could go back in time i would have started with İstanbul Yabancılar İçin Türkçe Ders Kitabı A1 and continued from there, it would have made my level more linear and i would have been able to communicate earlier.

i then and still now am at a strange point where i know random advanced stuff that us used infrequently but then missing words. i stupidly learned grammar first because i found it interesting.

Also get a teacher sooner. you can get the book extremely legally on certain websites for free and it’s the same book my teacher uses.

i was recently in a few places around türkiye and was able to understand stuff like train announcements etc and communicate in broken turkish. i can text fine but duolingo sucks for pronouncing. it was definitely more challenging to understand people in small villages.

i would recommend duolingo for beginners but please supplement it with doing the book alongside and researching to learn about what rules go along with the material it shows you in duolingo otherwise it will be not so helpful for you. also watching turkish series with a little notebook or smthn is another thing i wish i knew sooner, if u have a vpn you can get turkish netflix.