inmek (to get off / descend) | Turkish Grammar

inmek means to descend, to go down, to get off / out of. It is the natural opposite of binmek "to board" — and the contrast between them is one of the cleanest demonstrations of how Turkish uses case to encode direction. You get on (binmek) with the dative, "toward"; you get off (inmek) with the ablative, "away from." Once you feel that asymmetry, a whole class of motion verbs becomes predictable rather than memorized.

The ablative of alighting

The defining government of inmek: what you get off, or come down from, takes the ablative case (-DAn). The ablative is the "from / off" case, and getting off a bus is precisely motion away from it.

Bir sonraki durakta otobüsten ineceğim.

I'm getting off the bus at the next stop.

Attan inerken ayağını incitti.

He hurt his foot while getting off the horse.

Asansörden indik, merdivenleri kullandık.

We got out of the lift and used the stairs.

The same ablative covers coming down from any height or surface: dağdan inmek (come down the mountain), çatıdan inmek (come down from the roof), merdivenden inmek (come down the stairs). The rule is invariant — descent and exit are source, so they pattern with the ablative.

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English uses "off" and "out of" and "down from" — three prepositions — for what Turkish handles with one ablative ending. Don't translate the preposition; identify the relation. If you are moving away from a surface or vehicle, it's the ablative -DAn.

The bin- / in- asymmetry: the headline insight

Here is the pattern worth tattooing on your memory:

Action	Verb	Case on the vehicle	Direction
get on / board	binmek	dative (otobüse)	toward →
get off / alight	inmek	ablative (otobüsten)	away from ←

Otobüse Taksim'de bindim, Kadıköy'de indim.

I got on the bus at Taksim and got off at Kadıköy.

This one sentence carries the whole logic: bindim pulls the dative (binmek → toward), indim pulls the ablative (inmek → away). The places where you board and alight (Taksim'de, Kadıköy'de) sit in the locative because they are simply the locations of the events. For the boarding half of the pair, see kalkmak and binmek; for the broader range of the ablative, see uses of the ablative.

The dative of destination

inmek can also point at where you are heading down to — a floor, a level, a place. That destination takes the dative (-A), the goal case. So a single inmek sentence can carry both an ablative (what you leave) and a dative (where you arrive).

Yukarıdan bodruma indik.

We went down to the basement from upstairs.

Beşinci kattan zemine indim.

I went down from the fifth floor to the ground floor.

There is no conflict here: ablative marks the source, dative marks the goal, and inmek happily takes either or both. This is the general Turkish pattern for motion — source in the ablative, goal in the dative — applied to vertical movement. See the dative case for the goal half.

Figurative descents

Because "going down" is such a basic image, inmek extends into several everyday metaphors — all still intransitive, all still pointing downward.

Prices/temperatures fall: a value comes down.
Swelling/fever goes down: it subsides.
A road descends / leads down: it slopes toward a place.

Bu kış doğalgaz fiyatları biraz indi.

This winter natural gas prices came down a bit.

İlaçtan sonra ateşi otuz yedi dereceye indi.

After the medicine his fever dropped to thirty-seven degrees.

Bu yol doğru sahile iner.

This road goes straight down to the shore.

Notice dereceye / sahile in the dative — even in the figurative sense, "down to a level/place" keeps the dative goal. The directional logic is fully consistent across literal and metaphorical uses.

The aorist: iner

inmek is a regular monosyllabic verb taking the aorist -er: iner. This is the form you hear in announcements, general statements, and the "this road leads down to…" sense above.

Person	Aorist (positive)	Aorist (negative)
ben	inerim	inmem
sen	inersin	inmezsin
o	iner	inmez
biz	ineriz	inmeyiz
siz	inersiniz	inmezsiniz
onlar	inerler	inmezler

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inmek is intransitive ("go down"). To say someone brings or takes something down — "lower the prices," "carry the bags downstairs" — you need the causative indirmek "to lower / take down / download." That extra -dir- is what turns "go down" into "make go down."

Valizleri arabadan indirir misin?

Could you take the suitcases down from the car?

This inmek / indirmek split (go down / take down) mirrors the general Turkish causative pattern and is worth filing next to binmek / bindirmek (get on / put on board).

Common mistakes

Almost every inmek error is a case error driven by English prepositions:

❌ Otobüse indim.

Incorrect — that's the boarding case; getting OFF needs the ablative -DEn.

✅ Otobüsten indim.

I got off the bus.

❌ Otobüste indim.

Incorrect — locative 'on the bus' marks a location, not the source of descent.

✅ Otobüsten indim.

I got off the bus.

❌ Fiyatları indi.

Incorrect — inmek is intransitive; for 'they lowered the prices' use the causative indirdiler.

✅ Fiyatlar indi.

The prices came down.

❌ Üçüncü kattan indirdim.

Incorrect — indirmek means 'take something down'; if you yourself went down, it's indim.

✅ Üçüncü kattan indim.

I came down from the third floor.

The single most important habit: when you "get off / come down from" something, reach for the ablative -DAn, never the dative. The dative belongs to binmek (getting on); inmek's source belongs to the ablative.

Key takeaways

inmek = descend / get off / get out of. The thing you leave takes the ablative (otobüsten, attan, dağdan) — motion away from.
The destination of the descent takes the dative (bodruma, sahile): source = ablative, goal = dative.
binmek (dative) ↔ inmek (ablative) is the model directional pair: toward vs away.
Figurative uses (prices, fever, a sloping road) keep the same intransitive, downward logic.
Aorist iner; the causative indirmek means "lower / take down / download" — use it when an agent acts on an object.

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