You should learn as much Turkish as you can before you go, and improve it as much as you can while you're there. The rewards, in terms of convenience, enjoyment and building connections with people, are immense.

Turkish is not intrinsically difficult. It is just very different from the native languages of most Lycian Way walkers. Compared to English (or German, or French, or...), Turkish is very logical, elegant and well-designed. Here are some of the things that make Turkish different, and wonderful. If you understand these things, you should find that learning Turkish, like walking, is just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other.

The Django effect: regularity. In Turkish, rules have no exceptions, or at least, when they do, they can be counted on Django's left hand*. A given letter is (nearly) always pronounced the same way. There are (nearly) no irregular nouns or verbs, no genders, no declensions or conjugations to burden the memory.

The camel effect: head finality. Like a camel (at least, when it's walking in a certain direction), a Turkish phrase or sentence always has the head at the right-hand end. Imagine what an awkward customer the camel would be if its head was in the middle. For a start, it wouldn't be able to see past all that luggage. And what is the head of a phrase? It's the bit that co-ordinates all the other parts. In a sentence, it's the main verb. Consider: Deli turist ağır çantayı Fethiye'den Antalya'ya taşıdı. "The crazy tourist carried a heavy bag from Fethiye to Antalya".

The head of this sentence is "carried" (taşıdı in Turkish). In English, it occurs somewhere in the middle, under all the bags of stuff. In Turkish, it's at the end, where it can see out. And for good measure, "turist" the head of "deli turist" is at the end of its phrase, and the same goes for "ağır çantayı" (heavy bag). English only sometimes does the sensible thing. Turkish always does. If only English did too, the Turks would find it easy... And just to rub the finality thing in, Turkish usually stresses the last syllable in a word: bir birA istiyorUM. Or, of course, dikKAT köPEK var.

The Fethiye-to-Antalya effect: vowel harmony. Just as no sane Turk would voluntarily walk all the way across Lycia even without a heavy bag, they also see no reason to move their tongues from the front to the back of their mouths unless they absolutely have to. "Fethiye" has all front vowels. "Antalya" has all back vowels. If you say "Fethiye Antalya Fethiye Antalya..." over and over again and notice what happens to your tongue, you should feel it alternately going forward for "Fethiye" and retreating for "Antalya". Each back vowel has a front counterpart, written as the back version with one or two dots over it (except for "e", which really ought to be "ä" for full consistency).

Suffixes like "den/dan" ("from") harmonize with what precedes them, so walking according to the book we go Fethiye'den Antalya'ya. But if we then decide we enjoyed it so much we're going to walk all the way back, we would go Antalya'dan Fethiye'ye. The point is that "den" and "dan" are "the same" suffix, and so are "ya" and "ye".

The rice pudding effect: agglutinativity. Where English (etc) tends to use lots of little words, Turkish often uses one long one. For example: yürüyoruz, meaning "we are walking", consists of three parts: yürü, walk; yor, "be -ing"; and uz, "we". To some extent, you can think of these parts as if they were separate words. You then have to get them in the right order and make sure their vowels harmonize. It's a little tricky at first, but it soon comes with practice, at least for the simple cases that you'll need most of the time.

Some books. A basic audio course will teach you pronunciation. Then, I really like "Teach Yourself Turkish" by the Pollards (1996) to get a good grounding, and the small and light Rough Guide Turkish dictionary/phrasebook, which also teaches some grammar, to carry around in the rucksack.

* Django Reinhardt, 1910-53: legendary jazz guitarist who only had the use of three fingers on his left hand.

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