Turkish Verbs

An essential part of learning the Turkish language is to gain a firm grasp on basic verbs and how to use them in sentences. In addition to developing your vocabulary skills, gaining a more comprehensive understanding of Turkish verbs will allow you to get more out of conversations with native Turkish speakers, to comprehend greater portions of Turkish text, and to develop your overall language skills at a quicker pace.

With the proper use of Turkish verbs, you will able to express the meaning of sentences more effectively. For instance, is the action of the sentence taking place now, in the future, or has it already occurred? Learning to conjugate verbs will allow to you understand and convey conversation in a way that clarifies the context. Without an understanding of the basic verbs of the language and how to use them properly, attempting a conversation in Turkish would become a very time-consuming process with a lot of misunderstandings.

With the exception of olmak (to read), all verbs in the Turkish language are regular. In other words, all of the verbs are conjugated using the standard grammatical inflections of Turkish; a single type of conjugation is used for all Turkish verbs.

Each verb is made of two distinct parts: the stem and the infinitive suffix (-mek/-mak). The suffix that is added to the verb depends on the last vowel used in the stem of the verb. The following examples demonstrate proper verb conjugation:

koşmak (to run)

koşarım I run

koşarsın you run

koşar he/she/it runs

koşarız we run

koşarsın you run

koşarlar they run

yemek (to eat)

yerim I eat

yersin you eat

yer he/she/it eats

yeriz we eat

yersiniz you eat

yerler they eat

There will be many times when you want to negate a verb in a sentence. For instance, you may want to say, “This is not my hat.” Learning about negation will help you to change the meaning of the sentence to more effectively communicate. For example, you may learn to say, “I read this book,” which is Ben bu kitabı okuyorum in the Turkish language. However, if you want to say “I don’t read this book,” you will have to change the spelling of the verb. In this case, you would replace okuyorum with okumuyorum in order to say, “I don’t read this book.”

While learning basic verbs and how to use them in sentences will be a challenge, it will be worth your time and effort in improving your Turkish language skills.