Almost every Tatar textbook, course and grammar explanation assumes you already speak Russian. Many people who decide to learn Tatar find this out within an hour of looking, whether they're heritage learners who grew up hearing a grandmother speak it, linguists drawn to Turkic languages, or people who married into a family from Kazan.
If you don't read Russian, here is how to learn Tatar anyway. Spend your first week on the Cyrillic alphabet and its six extra letters. Use a course that explains the language in English. Then build up in short daily sessions: greetings, numbers, the case endings that say where things are, and sentences with the verb at the end. Tatar is a Turkic language with very regular grammar, so steady effort pays off more than talent does.
Which Tatar is this?
Tatar, sometimes called Kazan Tatar or Volga Tatar, is the language of Tatarstan, a republic of the Russian Federation on the Volga, where it's an official language alongside Russian. Tatars are Russia's second-largest ethnic group, so you'll also find speakers in neighboring Bashkortostan, in Moscow, the Urals and Siberia, in Central Asia and in small communities abroad. The number of speakers is in the low millions, and many of them use Russian at least as much as Tatar in daily life.
Crimean Tatar is a different language. It's also Turkic, and related, but it comes from Crimea, has its own literary tradition and is usually written in Latin letters. If that's the one you're after, this guide and Qlango's Tatar course are about the other one.
Family, script and a trick for Turkish speakers
Tatar belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic family. Its closest relative is Bashkir, and it's a cousin of Kazakh. Speakers of Turkish recognize a lot of Tatar, with a twist: at some point in its history Tatar shifted several vowels. Turkish et (meat) is ит in Tatar, göl (lake) is күл, and gel (come) is кил. Once you see the pattern, a lot of words fall into place.
Tatar was written in an Arabic-based script for centuries, briefly in Latin letters from the late 1920s, and in Cyrillic since 1939. Today's alphabet is the Russian one plus six letters: ә (like the "a" in "cat"), ө and ү (like German ö and ü), җ (a soft "j"), ң (the "ng" in "sing") and һ ("h"). If you already read Russian, that's two or three days of work. If you don't, give it a week.
What will feel easy, and what won't
There's no grammatical gender, so ул means "he", "she" and "it". There are no articles. Verbs follow regular patterns, and the suffixes behave predictably. Here are three of Tatar's six cases on one word:
- Казанда: in Kazan
- Казанга: to Kazan
- Казаннан: from Kazan
What takes longer is vowel harmony, which changes a suffix's vowel to match the word it's attached to; the verb-at-the-end word order; and long words built from several suffixes, which you have to take apart before you can understand them. If you know Russian, the many Russian loanwords help. If you don't, they're simply more words to learn.
The other difficulty isn't grammar at all. In Kazan you'll hear plenty of Russian, and many Tatars move between the two languages mid-sentence. You may have to go looking for Tatar conversation rather than wait for it to find you.
