The thing about Turkish is that the grammar is very forgiving to mistakes while preserving meaning: word order can be leveraged for subtle emphasis but pretty much doesn't matter for general meaning. Conjugations are pretty much always standard. There is a "correct" ordering for the suffixes but the meaning is generally obvious even without them. If you mess up the vowel harmony it just sounds odd but again the meaning is clear. You can often omit articles because the suffixes mirror them. It's also a phonetic language - there's no "sounds different at the end of the word" etc.
It's really the perfect language to pick up on a visit even ... except the vocabulary doesn't resemble anything that most of the rest of the world speaks. There's lots of loanwords from farsi, arabic, french and english of course but beyond that and speakers of other Turkic languages, it's struggle for most people.
But yes, it's true that we're often over the moon that someone put in the effort to speak it :-)
This not being a coincidence is the Altaic Family Hypothesis, which posits that Turkic, Mongolic and often also Japonic and/or Korean languages form a superfamily, sharing a common ancestor. The hypothesis is mostly discredited by present-day linguistics.
Is that the only explanation though? Could proximity explain things? It is my private theory that German and Polish having had so much geographic overlap explains some common features, despite being from different families.
I don't know to what extent this has happened with German and Polish. They are, of course, (somewhat distant) cousins in any case, both being Indo-European languages.
But it is often the case that geographically close languages influence each other -- the term in linguistics is "sprachbund". If one is entirely honest, a lot of languages have taken vocabulary or grammatical features from one or more languages from other language families, rendering the entire idea of a language "family" (the word is here evoked to imply a pure genetic lineage) kind of suspect to begin with. But it still is how linguistics is commonly done today.
The basis for my very non-scientific observation is that I am a native Dutch speaker, who's conversational in German and has a Polish partner. German fits quite well in between Polish and Dutch in terms of features: Dutch has few, Polish has nearly all, and German has quite a few more than Dutch ;) Similarities between Dutch and German are more easily understood since they've a recent ancestor, but for Polish and German we must go back much further. Yet, my untrained eyes see a sort of continuity that seems to cross the language-family barrier, which could make sense because of that shared geography of German and Polish. I know that Poles have a history of fervent conversationalism that favors (grammatic) complexity, so perhaps it's a hobby that spilled over to German-speakers. Or vice versa (I know less of German cultural history).
One could say all sorts of things, sure, but that's neither here nor there. German and Polish have an identifiable common ancestor. I'd be surprised to learn of any grammatical similarities between the two that aren't also found in other IE languages.
indeed; but still incredible that it retained so many characteristics over time and at such great distance from origin! I had been very fascinated with this.
Going the other way around, coming from a Slavic language I was really surprised at how many Turkish words we have. I didn't realize this until watching the show Diriliş: Ertuğrul, and doing a double take every other line. "Why are there so many Serbo-Croat words in there???"
The "error tolerance" you mention is interesting, especially in contrast with Mandarin. My understanding is that messing up the intonation there can completely alter the meaning of words, leading to trope situations where the foreigner says something embarrassing and all the native speakers laugh.
It’s even worse for Cantonese, at least from what I noticed when travelling in HK. Where speakers are pretty much forced to shout out every single word when there’s any background noise whatsoever. (or get very close to their interlocutor’s ears, practically lips touching earlobes)
A tourist who can speak a few sentences in Turkish could get a lot of free stuff in small shops when I used to live in Istanbul. My "cute" French didn't have the same effect in Paris though.
It's really the perfect language to pick up on a visit even ... except the vocabulary doesn't resemble anything that most of the rest of the world speaks. There's lots of loanwords from farsi, arabic, french and english of course but beyond that and speakers of other Turkic languages, it's struggle for most people.
But yes, it's true that we're often over the moon that someone put in the effort to speak it :-)