The best way for beginers is bilingual books. I suggest you Fono's books which have all levels and some bilingual magazines like Atlas. And an online newspaper with dictionary like " Today's Zaman " will be nice for you. I hope you have great success in Turkish.

Lizy, I agree with aromano. You may start by reading turkish newspapers online (Hurriyet, Radikal, Cumhuriyet) or try to read some articles in Turkish wikipedia (you may easily shift to English to understand the context of some articles). If you decide to go for books, there are these children books called 'Küçük Ayşegül'. They are simple to read and there is a version in English called 'Mary'. For poetry, I recommend the works of Can Yücel, Orhan Veli Kanık, Özdemir Asaf, Attila Ilhan. You may find some translations of Can Yücel works here - http://lyricstranslate.com/en/can-yuecel-lyrics.html I have also started by checking some songs, because it is not so hard to find their translations to English in the website enclosed above. I particularly enjoy Pinhanı, Bülent Ortaçgil, Birşen Tezer, Kazım Koyuncu, but you may choose other singers and bands according to your preferred music style.

why don't you try to read turkish newspapers online? They are for free and some of them use rather a simple turkish. I think this is the best way to improve your vocabulary. Here is one: www.hurriyet.com.tr (this is a mainstream turkish newspapers) If you rather want to listen to TV programs, I suggest www.cnnturk.com.tr (because the level of discussion programs is rather good the third possibility is reading poetry which has a very long tradition in turkey.

I think Ömer Seyfettin's story books are great source to learn Turkish 'cuz they are both simple and nice stories. You can learn so many words from these stories.

There are a lot of Turkish songs on YouTube with lyrics, both Turkish and English. Search for a singer or song + lyrics (or sözler). This is a painless way to add vocabulary. Here is a good one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj-3EAT_kw4