In this article, drawing on 40 years of experience in teaching Turkish to Flemish adults and students, the author communicates his personal observations and suggestions in this domain. In the first part of the article, a number of general principles are explained, which have deliberately been included in Haydi Türkçe Konuşalım, the course book compiled by the author, and which differentiate it from other course books. According to the author, these principles, which increase both the course’s effectiveness and the students’ interest, can be applied to all types of students and languages. In the second part, the author discusses the problems encountered by his own students while studying Turkish in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon, and describes the solutions to these problems. Their struggles can be attributed to the huge expanse between the Turkish language and the Flemish students’ mother tongue and their other foreign languages. For each Turkish structure discussed, the question is raised whether the same structure causes a problem for Kazakh students or not.