I teach Turkish, I read Ottoman documents, and I spend most of my working life inside the history of one language. This page is the long version, for anyone deciding whether to book an hour with a stranger.
I am Sedef Buğday. I live in Istanbul and I teach online.
I took my degree and my master’s in Turkish Language and Literature at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, the master’s in the Old Turkic programme. My undergraduate thesis was a syntactic study of Ali Şîr Nevâyî’s Muhâkemetü’l-Lugateyn — a 15th-century argument about whether Turkish or Persian is the better literary language, which is a good place to start if you want to know why I ended up doing this.
For my master’s I worked on a philological edition of a Handbook of Medicine: transcription, index and facsimile. Months of reading a manuscript slowly. That work is where the Ottoman track on this site comes from.
In 2018 I took the Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language certificate at Marmara University. In 2019 and 2020 I completed the teaching qualification at Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa.
Between 2023 and 2024 I taught at a children’s home in Istanbul, working with foreign-national children aged six to twelve, mostly on reading and writing Turkish and on primary-level maths. Teaching a child to read a language they are still learning to speak is the hardest teaching I have done, and it is the reason I am comfortable with beginners and with children abroad.
Since 2025 I have taught adult literacy at the Bahçelievler Public Education Centre. Adults learning to read are a reminder that the alphabet is not trivial and that nobody should be rushed through it.
I plan. You will know what we are doing and why, and if something is not working we change it rather than pushing on.
I will tell you when you do not need me. If your child is four, read to them instead. If you have one document, I will say so rather than selling you a course.
I will also tell you when something is genuinely hard. Siyâkat, the clerks’ hand used in Ottoman financial registers, is hard. Speaking a new language in front of another person is hard. Being told otherwise by a teacher is not encouragement, it is a setup for giving up in month three.
Outside teaching: historical sites, novels, alphabets, pre-Islamic Turkic life, art history and mythology. The alphabets one is not a hobby I picked up for this website — it is why the three things I teach are the three things I teach.
Tell me what you are after and roughly where you are starting from. I answer within one working day with a price and two or three possible times.