Arapça ve Kürtçe Açısından Türkçenin Fonetik ve Morfolojik Yapısının Yabancı Dil Olarak Türkçe Öğrenimine Etkisi

The main problem of this study is to reveal to what extent the experiences of students whose native languages are Arabic and Kurdish create facilitating or challenging effects while learning the phonetic and morphological structures of Turkish. The purpose of the research is to evaluate the effects of linguistic features such as Turkish orthography–phonology correspondence, agglutinative structure, vowel harmony, and the absence of gender categories on the learning processes of students in Iraq. The study was conducted using the case study model of qualitative research methods and involved a total of 60 students selected through simple random sampling. Data was collected through face-to-face interviews and analyzed using descriptive and content analysis techniques. Participants expressed their perceptions of the phonetic and morphological structure of Turkish through their responses to the research questions. The findings revealed that most students considered the characteristics of Turkish -being written as it is pronounced and pronounced as it is written- as fundamental facilitating factors supporting reading and writing skills. Moreover, morphological features such as the vowel harmony of suffixes, the stability of verb stems, and the absence of irregular verbs were evaluated as a regular and transparent structure by the students. The lack of gender categories in Turkish was found to provide significant ease, particularly for Arabic-speaking learners. At the syntactic level, the placement of verbs at the end of sentences and the fact that pronunciation differences do not change meaning were also identified as factors facilitating learning. In conclusion, it was determined that the phonetic and morphological structures of Turkish are largely perceived positively by students and serve as supportive elements in the learning process. Keywords: Teaching Turkish as a foreign language, Morphological structure of Turkish, Phonetic structure of Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish.