-DI vs -mIş: Witnessed vs Reported Past | Turkish Grammar

Turkish has two simple past tenses, and English speakers are constantly surprised to learn that the choice between them has almost nothing to do with when something happened. Both -DI (gitti, yağdı, geldi) and -mIş (gitmiş, yağmış, gelmiş) point to a completed past event. What separates them is how you know it happened — whether you witnessed and vouch for it yourself, or whether you are reporting hearsay, inferring from evidence, or telling a story. This page gives you a single test for choosing correctly; the full conjugation paradigms live on the dedicated -DI past tense and -mIş evidential pages.

The one question that decides it

Before you attach a past-tense suffix, ask yourself: was I there, do I personally vouch for this?

Yes, I witnessed it / I assert it as fact → use -DI.
No — I was told, I'm guessing from clues, or I'm narrating → use -mIş.

This is the grammatical category linguists call evidentiality: the verb itself encodes your source of information. English has no comparable obligatory system. We bolt on extra words — "apparently," "I heard," "it seems" — but we can also leave the source completely unmarked. Turkish forces you to commit on every single past-tense verb. There is no neutral option.

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The split is about your source of knowledge, not about time. "It rained" can be either tense depending on whether you watched it fall or just saw the wet streets afterward.

The classic minimal pair: yağdı vs yağmış

The textbook example is rain, because the same event gives you two completely different sentences depending on your evidence.

Dün gece çok yağmur yağdı, balkonda oturuyordum.

It rained a lot last night — I was sitting out on the balcony.

Here you use yağdı because you were there, watching and hearing it. You personally vouch for the rain.

Sabah kalktım, her yer ıslaktı — gece yağmur yağmış.

I got up in the morning, everywhere was wet — it must have rained in the night.

You did not see the rain. You woke up, found wet streets, and inferred it. That inference is exactly what yağmış signals. Translating it as a flat "it rained" loses the whole point; the Turkish carries an "evidently / it turns out" built right into the verb.

Use 1: witnessed and vouched-for facts → -DI

Anything you saw, did, felt, or otherwise stand behind as a first-hand fact takes -DI. Your own actions almost always take -DI, because who is a better witness to what you did than you?

Sabah yedi buçukta kalktım, kahvaltı yaptım ve işe gittim.

I got up at seven thirty, had breakfast, and went to work.

Maçı izledik, Galatasaray iki sıfır kazandı.

We watched the match — Galatasaray won two-nil.

Use 2: hearsay (you were told) → -mIş

When you are passing on information you got from someone else and did not verify yourself, -mIş is obligatory. Using -DI here would falsely claim you witnessed it.

Ayşe aramış, toplantı yarına ertelenmiş.

Ayşe called — the meeting's been postponed to tomorrow (so I'm told).

Notice that even though you definitely received Ayşe's call, the content of the news (the postponement) is something you only heard about, so it stays -mIş. You can also report a person's own statement this way:

Mehmet dün çok hastaymış, o yüzden gelmemiş.

Mehmet was apparently very ill yesterday, that's why he didn't come (according to what I heard).

Use 3: inference from evidence → -mIş

You did not witness the event and nobody told you — you are deducing it from the traces it left. This is the yağmış case generalised.

Çantam açık, biri buraya dokunmuş.

My bag is open — someone has been at this (someone touched it, I can tell).

Yemek soğumuş, demek ki çoktan gelmiş ama beni beklememiş.

The food's gone cold, so he must have arrived a while ago but didn't wait for me.

Use 4: surprise / newly realised situation (mirativity) → -mIş

A special, very common use: you discover something about your own immediate situation that you were not consciously aware of as it happened. The -mIş here conveys sudden realisation — often translatable as "oh, it turns out…" or "I didn't even notice that…".

Aaa, uyuyakalmışım! Alarmı duymamışım.

Oh no, I fell asleep! I didn't (even) hear the alarm.

You obviously slept and missed the alarm yourself, yet you use -mIş, not -DI. Why? Because you had no conscious awareness of the event as it unfolded — you only just now realised it. Your "evidence" is the situation you woke up into, not a memory of the act itself.

Ne kadar büyümüşsün, seni en son gördüğümde bu kadar değildin!

My, how you've grown — you weren't this big last time I saw you!

Use 5: storytelling and folktales → -mIş

Traditional tales, jokes, and reported anecdotes are told in -mIş, which frames the whole narrative as something handed down rather than witnessed. Every Turkish fairy tale opens this way:

Bir varmış bir yokmuş, evvel zaman içinde bir padişah yaşarmış.

Once upon a time, long ago, there lived a sultan.

This narrative use is explored in depth on the evidentials in narrative page, and the broader discourse logic on the evidentiality and discourse page.

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If you would naturally add "apparently," "it seems," "I heard," "it turns out," or "supposedly" in English, that is a near-certain signal that Turkish wants -mIş.

A quick decision table

Your situation	Tense	Example
I saw / did / felt it myself	-DI	geldi (he came — I saw him)
Someone told me	-mIş	gelmiş (he came, I'm told)
I'm inferring from clues	-mIş	gelmiş (he must have come)
I just realised it (surprise)	-mIş	gelmişim (I came / turns out I…)
I'm telling a tale	-mIş	bir prens yaşarmış

Common mistakes

English speakers default to -DI for everything because English has no witnessed/reported distinction. These are the errors that result.

❌ Haberlerde duydum, deprem oldu.

Incorrect for relaying news you only heard — -DI claims you witnessed it.

✅ Haberlerde duydum, deprem olmuş.

I heard on the news there's been an earthquake.

❌ Bak, kar yağdı!

Incorrect if said on seeing snow already lying on the ground — you're inferring, not vouching for the falling, so it needs -mIş.

✅ Bak, kar yağmış! Her yer bembeyaz olmuş.

Look, it's snowed! Everything's gone white.

❌ Annem söyledi, teyzem dün geldi.

Incorrect — the arrival is hearsay relayed from your mother, so it can't be -DI.

✅ Annem söyledi, teyzem dün gelmiş.

My mum told me my aunt arrived yesterday.

❌ Özür dilerim, telefonumu sessize aldım ve aramanı kaçırdım.

Incorrect if you're only just realising it now — a just-discovered lapse takes -mIş, not -DI.

✅ Özür dilerim, telefonum sessizdeymiş, aramanı kaçırmışım.

Sorry, my phone was on silent — I missed your call (only just realised).

A subtler error is over-using -mIş. If you genuinely witnessed something, do not soften it into -mIş to sound polite — to a Turkish ear that signals you didn't actually see it, which can come across as dodging responsibility.

Key takeaways

The choice between -DI and -mIş encodes your source of knowledge, not the time of the event — both are past tenses.
Use -DI for events you witnessed, did, or assert as personal fact.
Use -mIş for hearsay, inference from evidence, sudden realisation, and storytelling.
"It rained": yağdı if you watched it, yağmış if you saw the wet streets or were told.
When English would naturally add "apparently / I heard / it turns out," reach for -mIş.
Don't reflexively map every English past to -DI — Turkish is forcing you to declare your evidence on every verb.

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