The Focus of this Lesson is Talking About the Weather.
Yağmur mu yağıyor?
"Is it raining?"

1. How to talk about the weather 

The weather and the temperature are always the safest topics for making small talk, so let's look at some of the related adjectives. When describing the weather with adjectives, the adjective is used at the end of the sentence. If you're going to talk about weather in the past, past tense suffix -di or -miş can be added to the adjective. However, present continuous or future tense suffixes/infixes cannot be used with adjectives; instead, the auxiliary verbs olmak ("to be") should be used.

Vocabulary List: Adjectives Related to Temperature and Weather

Let's look at four adjectives describing the air temperature. They're really useful, so try to memorize them.

Describing the Day's Temperature

In Turkish hava means "weather" or "air," and when you combine it with one of the adjectives above, your description is complete. It's very simple. For example, Hava sıcak means "It's hot." Try to replace sıcak with soğuk, ılık, or serin and add çok ("too") in front of the adjective.

Adjectives and Expressions about Weather

Some adjectives and their English equivalents are:

For example:

1. Dün kar yağdı ve hava çok soğuktu.
   "It snowed yesterday and the temperature was freezing."
2. Mersin'in havası sıcak ve nemlidir.
   "Mersin is hot and humid."
3. İstanbul'da Mayıs ılık olur.
   "Istanbul is warm during May."

2. The Present Continuous

In this lesson you will also learn how to talk about the weather using the "present continuous tense."

Here are some examples from the dialogue:

1. Sadece çiseliyor.
   "It's just drizzling."
2. Fırtına bekleniyormuş.
     "A storm is expected."

As you can see there is a common element in these two verbs, the infix/suffix -yor-.

Let's take a look at another verb for the conjugation: çizmek ("to draw"). In present continuous tense with personal suffixes, çizmek becomes:

• çiz-iyor-um (First person singular) "I am drawing."
• çiz-iyor-sun (Second person singular) "You are drawing."
• çiz-iyor (Third person singular) "He/she/it is drawing."
• çiz-iyor-uz (First person plural) "We are drawing."
• çiz-iyor-sunuz (Second person plural) "You are drawing."
• çiz-iyor-lar (Third person plural) "They are drawing."

The -iyor infix also changes into -ıyor,-uyor, or -üyor depending on the vowel harmony rules. Here, the rule is that the vowel i must change into another vowel to comply with the final vowel in the verb root.

Let's illustrate the previous explanation with a few examples.

- yağ-ıyor means "It is raining." Here, the -iyor suffix  i turns into ı to match the final vowel of the verb root, which is also ı.

- dur-uyor means "It is stopping." Here, the -iyor suffix i turns into u to match the final vowel of the verb root, which is also u.

- büzül-üyor means "He/she/it is shrinking." Here, the -iyor suffix i turns into ü to match the final vowel of the verb root, which is also ü.

Let's also look at how to form negative sentences using this tense.

To make a present continuous tense verb negative you need to attach the negative suffix -me right after the verb root. As you know, in Turkish two vowels cannot exist in sequence. Therefore, the -e- in -me can't go with the -i in -iyor. Just like in çisele-me-iyor, -e drops and the word becomes çiselemiyor.

Examples from the dialogue:

1. Hava nemli ve rüzgarlı. Fırtına bekleniyormuş.
   "The weather is humid and windy. A storm is expected."

Sample Sentences

1. Ankara'da yazın yağmur yağmaz.
   "It doesn't rain in Ankara during summer."
2. Bu dolu yağışı beklenmiyordu.
   "This hail wasn't expected."

yağmak "to rain," "to fall," "to drop"

This verb is exclusively used for objects falling down from the sky. Noun form of the verb, yağış, is also used exclusively to encompass all objects falling from the sky. This word doesn't point at what is falling down, so in order to specify, yağmur ("rain"), kar ("snow") etc. should be added before the verb, as in Kar yağıyor ("It's snowing").

A common phrase, başımıza taş yağacak ("we're going to be punished by falling rocks"), is often said after committing a deed one believes to be wrong.

For example:

1. Rize'de kar yağdı.
   "It snowed in Rize."

beklemek "to wait," "to expect"

Beklemek has two main meanings: "to wait" and "to expect." In a weather context, beklemek is mostly used in its passive form with "expectation," so beklenmek ("to be expected").

Weather forecasts employ this verb often to describe the potential for rain/snow/hail in an area. If rain/snow/hail has already started to fall, it's illogical to use this verb. Yağmak should be used instead.

For example:

1. Bu ay fırtına beklenmiyor.
   "No storm is expected for this month."

The Four Seasons of Turkey

Turkish people love the summer season, as most people get to go on long vacations during the summer months, but complaints of Hava çok sıcak! ("It's so hot!") are often heard. Southern beaches receive floods of both international and domestic tourists, while mountains in the North host those who don't want to get a suntan and prefer the calm of green plateaus. Regardless of the location, having a picnic is the number one activity but no Turkish summer picnic is ever complete without watermelons or mangal (Turkish barbecue). After long summer days of fun and laziness, autumn is the time for students to head back to school and grown ups to go back to their jobs. Rain is a common sight in most places, and the phrases bardaktan boşalırcasına ("as if water is being poured from a glass") or Nuh'un tufanı gibi ("like Noah's flood") are used to describe heavy rain falls. Also, autumn months are lively with the traditional preparation of staple foods for the winter. Not too many households in the city still participate in this tradition but for those who do, it's a flurry of activities like making copious amounts of tomato and pepper paste, drying vegetables on strings, making pickles and jams, etc. Everyone helps each other with these tasks and winter preparations are usually done long before the first snow hits the ground. Winter is mild in the South and very harsh in the North; snow piles can block village roads in Eastern Anatolia. Although families and friends gather inside, no one can keep children from playing in the snow especially when it's lapa lapa ("slow but heavy snow fall"). Eating kestane ("chestnut") and mandalina ("tangerine") is a winter time tradition. About a month after the New Year's celebrations, the weather starts to warm up unnoticeably slowly, a phenomenon called cemre düşmesi in Turkish, which signals the arrival of spring. Spring is usually brief with the commonly found plum trees and gelincik (literally "little bride," the red poppy) blooming beautifully. During mid-spring, Turkish people celebrate a religious festival called Hıdrellez by burying symbolic objects under rose plants and jumping over bonfires. The warm days of spring then turn into often scorchingly hot days of summer.