TYS reading

Turkey's ALTE-accredited national proficiency exam. 40 reading questions in 60 minutes — 90 seconds an item.

Official exam page

The Türkçe Yeterlik Sınavı is Turkey’s ALTE-accredited national proficiency exam, run by the Yunus Emre Institute. Its reading paper is the first of three sessions, and the arithmetic is unforgiving: forty questions in sixty minutes works out at ninety seconds an item.

The reading section

Reading time
60 minutesSource
Scored reading items
40Source
Texts or passages
not published
Approximate words
not published
CEFR level
B2–C1Source
Published annual volume
not published — no annual figure exists from the awarding body
Awarding body
Yunus Emre Enstitüsü

Question types the awarding body publishes

  • Çoktan seçmeli (multiple choice)
  • Doğru-yanlış (true/false)
Source

What that means in practice

Okuma is the first of three sessions, sat back to back with the 45-minute Dinleme in one 105-minute block, inside a 180-minute exam. 40 questions in 60 minutes works out at 90 seconds an item. Certificates are issued only at B2 and C1 as of 15 January 2022 — C2 certification was discontinued, so describing TYS as an A1–C2 exam is out of date.

Every figure on this page was checked against the awarding body on that date. Exam formats change; check the official page before you book.

How well reading practice fits this exam

A full reading section

Reading is a complete, separately scored section with real passages. Training it moves a number that appears on your result.

LingoRead trains reading. It does not prepare a speaking or writing paper, it does not mark free-text answers, and it does not issue or predict an official result.

Practise reading for this exam

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Ninety seconds an item, back to back with listening

Okuma is sat immediately before Dinleme in a single combined block, inside a longer whole-exam window. That matters more than the individual timings: there is no meaningful recovery gap, so the attention you spend re-reading a reading item is attention the listening section does not get.

The item types are multiple choice and true/false. Neither is exotic, but at ninety seconds each there is no room to decode a sentence twice — which makes automaticity, not knowledge, the thing that decides the paper.

A correction worth carrying

Since January 2022 certificates are issued only at B2 and C1. C2 certification was discontinued, so any page describing TYS as an A1–C2 exam is out of date. If you need a certified C2 in Turkish, TYS is not currently the route.

This is exactly the kind of detail that costs a candidate an exam fee, which is why the certification range on this page is printed from the catalogue with its source rather than from memory.

Building Turkish reading speed

For most learners the bottleneck in Turkish is agglutination: a single word carries what several words carry in other languages, and parsing it slows the sentence down. Daily reading is what turns that parsing from conscious work into recognition, and nothing else does it as cheaply.

LingoRead writes a Turkish passage at your level every day, reads it aloud, translates any word you tap and asks comprehension questions on it. It trains reading only — the listening and writing sessions of TYS are outside what we do, and we do not issue a TYS result.

Questions people ask

Free tools that help

Our four free tools are English-only for now, so there is no matching tool for this exam. They are still worth a look if you also read in English.

See the free tools
TYS reading: forty questions in sixty minutes | LingoRead