Irregular causative suffixes
Cooking lentils and dropping a pen reveal two Turkish causative families. Choose the verb’s suffix, apply harmony, and build all six shapes.
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-leyin: at a time of day
Evening keeps its vowels: attach fixed -leyin in sabahleyin, akşamleyin and geceleyin, recognise öğleyin, and avoid using this ending with clock times.
Read and practise-miştir: confident past assumptions
A parcel that should already be here: build all four Turkish endings for past assumptions, form negatives, and distinguish a likely event from a formal statement.
Read and practiseReported copula: apparently is (-miş)
A room turns out to have been a storeroom: build reported noun predicates in Turkish, including vowel harmony, person endings, negatives and questions.
Read and practiseConditional copula: ise / -(y)sa / -(y)se
A state becomes a condition: turn öğrenci into öğrenciysen, compare attached and separate ise, and place person endings and negation correctly.
Read and practise-sa / -se: wishing with keşke
A quieter evening, a shared swim: build Turkish wishes with -sa/-se, place negation before the suffix, and let the person ending identify who would act.
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Vowel harmony: the two-way and four-way rules
Learn how the last vowel of a Turkish word chooses the vowel of its suffix, in the two-way and the four-way patterns, with a table of all eight vowels.
Read and practiseWord order: the verb goes last
Where does the verb go in Turkish? At the end. See the usual subject, time, place, object, verb order and which words may move without changing the meaning.
Read and practisePersonal pronouns: ben, sen, o, biz, siz, onlar
Six Turkish pronouns from ben to onlar, and what surprises most learners: o has no gender, siz is also polite, and the verb ending often makes the pronoun unnecessary.
Read and practiseTo be: personal endings on nouns and adjectives
Turkish has no word for “am” or “are”: the ending does the work. Build öğrenciyim, öğrencisin and öğrenciyiz and see when the y appears.
Read and practisedeğil: I am not, it is not
Learn how değil negates nouns and adjectives, why the person ending sits on değil (değilim, değilsin) and not on the noun, and how verbs are negated instead.
Read and practisemi, mı, mu, mü: yes/no questions
Turn a Turkish statement into a yes/no question with the particle mi, mı, mu or mü: choose its vowel, put it after the right word and add the person ending.
Read and practiseQuestion words: ne, kim, nerede, nasıl, kaç
Ne, kim, nerede, nasıl and kaç ask about things, people, places, manner and number: put them where the answer would stand, and never add mi.
Read and practisebu, şu, o: this, that and he or she
Which Turkish word means this, which means that, and when is it he or she? Learn bu, şu and o, their plurals bunlar, şunlar and onlar, and why the noun carries the plural.
Read and practisevar and yok: there is, there is not
Say what exists and what is missing in Turkish with var and yok: a place in the locative, the thing, then one word, and a question with var mı.
Read and practisePresent continuous: what is happening now
Say what is going on right now with -yor: geliyorum, okuyorum, başlıyorum. Covers the narrow vowel, the lost final a or e, and the person endings.
Read and practiseI am not doing it: -mıyor / -miyor / -muyor / -müyor
Turn gidiyorum into gitmiyorum: where the negative goes, why its vowel changes before -yor, and how to ask Gelmiyor musun? with the question word written apart.
Read and practiseKnown objects: -(y)ı / -(y)i / -(y)u / -(y)ü
A specific object takes the accusative -ı/-i/-u/-ü (kitabı okuyorum), a general one stays bare (kitap okuyorum), because Turkish has no word for 'the'.
Read and practiseGoing to and giving to: the dative in sentences
The dative suffix marks where a movement ends and who receives something. See why the goal can never be left bare and why words ending in a vowel add a y.
Read and practiseWhere and from where: -de and -den in a sentence
Say where you are and where you come from: -de/-da for staying, -den/-dan for leaving, also when the place is a person, as in Ali'de and bende.
Read and practiseSaying “I have”: kitabım var
Say what you have in Turkish without a verb for have: the owner in the genitive, the thing with a possessive ending, then var or yok, as in Benim kitabım var.
Read and practiseAdjectives before nouns: güzel bir ev
In Turkish the adjective comes first and never takes an ending: büyük evlerde, güzel bir ev. See where bir goes and why ev büyük is a whole sentence.
Read and practiseNumbers and quantities: the noun stays singular
After üç, on, kaç, birkaç or çok a Turkish noun stays singular: iki kitap. See why the number already carries the plural and when -ler/-lar still appears.
Read and practiseCommands and polite requests: gel, gelin
Tell one friend gel, but say gelin to a stranger or a group. See how Turkish builds commands from the bare verb stem, and why git becomes gidin.
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