Lesson 4 — What Are You Doing Right Now?

1When? The words for time

Before you take on the verbs, it’s worth stocking up on the words for “when”. Otherwise you get a language where nothing ever happens at a particular moment. Good news: almost all of these work exactly as they are, with no ending attached. Sabah is both “morning” and “in the morning” — one word, two jobs.

And one more word worth pocketing whole: her — “every”. Put it in front of last lesson’s calendar and you get four expressions for the price of one: her gün, her hafta, her ay, her yıl.

You’ve had şimdi and bugün since Lesson 1, so the time list is complete. Do notice sık sık: the word really is doubled, and it isn’t a typo — Turkish is fond of these paired intensifiers.

2The dictionary form: -mak and -mek

In a dictionary, Turkish verbs look suspiciously alike: every last one of them ends in -mak or -mek. That’s the infinitive — “to read”, “to go”, “to know”. Which of the two a verb gets is decided by the same vowel harmony that handed out -lar and -ler back in Lesson 1. Same two teams, same way to check: say it out loud and your ear will pick.

Here are twelve verbs that this lesson — and a good half of the ones after it — will lean on. No need to memorise them right now; they’ll pass in front of you plenty of times before the day is out.

One warning, before you walk into this in a restaurant: yemek is both “to eat” and “food”. Turkish economises sometimes, and you’ll have to look at the words around it.

3The present tense in -yor

This is what everything so far was for. Up to now you could say who is who and what is where. Now you can finally say that somebody is doing something — right this second or as a general habit. One tense covers both: geliyorum is “I’m coming” this very moment and “I come” every Thursday.

The form is built from four layers, and their order never changes: stem, narrow vowel, -yor, personal ending.

Step one: cut off the -mak or -mek. What’s left is the stem — gel-, yaz-, oku-, konuş-. Everything glues onto that.

Step two: if the stem ends in a consonant, add a narrow vowel. Four teams do the work here — exactly the ones that handed out mı/mi/mu/mü and -da/-de/-ta/-te in Lesson 2. Nothing new to learn; just look at the stem’s last vowel.

Step three — and here Turkish hands you a present. The -yor itself never changes. Not in a single word, not once: it’s the one affix in the language that refused to play the harmony game. And since it always ends in an “o”, the personal endings after it are always the same too. One table, learned once, good for every verb there is.

Notice that he/she gets no ending at all? It doesn’t need one — the -yor has already said everything. And here’s a liberty Turkish allows: with onlar you can simply leave that -lar off. Onlar geliyor sounds perfectly normal, and when the subject is named, the short version is the more usual one: Ayşe ve Can geliyor.

One case is left: a stem ending in a vowel. The rule for it is exactly one line — erase the final a or e and you are back in the case you just learned. There’s no second rule here, just one letter fewer.

oynuyor is worth a pause. The final a is gone, so harmony now looks at whichever vowel is last — the “o” in oyn-. Hence the u. And if a stem already ends in a narrow vowel, touch nothing at all: okumak → okuyor.

And three small things you’ll keep running into. Two verbs misbehave — only two, so they’re no trouble to remember. And gitmek softens its t to a d before a vowel, the same way etmek does.

Six verbs in both forms at once — dictionary on the left, working form on the right. Look at the picture rather than the gloss: that way the word attaches to the thing instead of to a word in your own language.

4The negative: “I’m not doing it”

Good news: there’s no new rule coming. The negative in Turkish is the affix -ma/-me, and it goes in right after the stem. But in front of -yor its vowel lands in exactly the position you worked through a minute ago: a final a or e before -yor. So it gets erased and a narrow vowel takes its place. Out comes -mı, -mi, -mu or -mü.

The order of the layers never wanders: stem, negative, -yor, who. Five pieces in a row and the word still reads left to right, one piece at a time. This is the thing people like about Turkish: it’s long, but it’s honest.

One word lives right next to the negative: hiç — “not at all”, “not a bit”, “never”. On its own it negates nothing; it needs a verb carrying -mı/-mi/-mu/-mü. Together, though, they give you the single most useful phrase of your first month, and there is nothing to be embarrassed about in it.

And if it’s the infinitive itself that needs a negative, just slip -ma/-me in before the -mak/-mek. Nothing narrows here — there’s no -yor nearby, so there’s nothing to narrow for.

5The -ca/-ce affix: turning a people into a language

You don’t really have to learn the names of languages in Turkish — you can assemble them. Take a people, add -ca or -ce, and the language is done: Türk → Türkçe, Rus → Rusça, Alman → Almanca. One rule instead of twenty separate words.

There are four variants, as usual, and you already know both switches. The vowel is picked by the same two teams as -mak/-mek. And the c goes voiceless into ç after a voiceless consonant — exactly the way -da turned into -ta back in Lesson 2.

Two things to lock in right away. First: the names of peoples and languages are capitalised in Turkish — Türkçe, Rusça, always. Second: the language name needs nothing further added to it. Türkçe konuşuyorum is already a finished “I speak Turkish” — no preposition, no case ending.

The -ca affix has a second job too — it makes adverbs out of other words, not just out of peoples. But that’s Lesson 20’s business; for now let it stick to languages.

6Countries, peoples, languages

Now for the question you’ll be asked in your very first week. Not “where are you from” — that comes later — but this one. And you can answer it honestly: biraz, “a little”, is a perfectly good answer.

Look at kaç dil once more and notice there’s no -lar anywhere in it. Last lesson’s rule hasn’t gone anywhere: after kaç, and after a number, the plural stays away — however many languages you happen to know.

These eight rows won’t reappear in the lesson’s glossary at the end — they’re better off here, in threes, because that’s how they actually stick: the country pulls the people along, and the people pull the language.

8Dialogue: Can is not where he ought to be

Ayşe is looking for Can. Can turns up, as usual, but not where he was meant to be. The whole thing runs on one question — Ne yapıyorsun? — and on answers in the present tense, so read it as an exercise pretending to be a conversation.

9Reading

Deniz moved in in Lesson 1, lost his key in Lesson 2 and was handed Friday in Lesson 3. Today he finally takes on Turkish — and finds out that a language sometimes arrives from a direction you weren’t watching. The whole text is the present tense and the negative, nothing else.

10The lesson’s new words

Everything new from today, in the order it appeared. The countries and their peoples and languages aren’t here — they stayed in their own table above, in threes. And the verbs are in their dictionary form: you can build the working one yourself now.

11Check yourself

Six items, and nearly all of them are about the same spot in the word: the vowel before -yor. A miss still shows you the right answer, so there’s no shame in guessing.

12Homework

Verbs are the kind of material that doesn’t go in through the eyes. Everything below is arranged so that you say as many forms out loud as possible. Getting them wrong isn’t just fine here, it’s required: -yor goes automatic somewhere around the hundredth repetition, and the hundredth is closer than it looks.