How to Use the Verb Reference

The pages in this section are a working reference for Turkish verbs: not a textbook to read front to back, but a place to look something up when you are mid-sentence and need the right form. This page explains how each entry is laid out, what the symbols mean, and — most importantly — why these pages spend almost no time on conjugation itself and instead concentrate on the three things that genuinely cannot be predicted from the dictionary form.

Why Turkish verbs need a different kind of reference

If you are coming from English, French, or Spanish, you expect a verb reference to be mostly a list of irregular conjugations: go / went / gone, aller / je vais / j'irai. Turkish does not work that way. Turkish conjugation is, with a tiny handful of exceptions, perfectly regular and agglutinative — you build every tense by gluing fixed suffixes onto the stem, adjusting only the vowels for vowel harmony. Once you know the template, every verb conjugates the same way.

So what is left to look up? Three things that are lexical — stored per verb in your memory, not derivable from rules:

1. The aorist linking vowel — whether a verb forms its aorist with -Ar or -Ir (yapar vs gelir). For monosyllabic stems this is genuinely unpredictable.
2. The causative allomorph — whether you build the "make someone do X" form with -t, -DIr, -Ir, or -It (okutmak vs yaptırmak vs içirmek).
3. The governed case — which case the verb forces on its object (-i, -e, -den, or -de), which almost never matches the English preposition.

What a verb entry contains

Each verb-reference entry gives you, in this order:

• The stem — the infinitive minus -mak/-mek. From yapmak you get the stem yap-; from gelmek, gel-. Everything attaches to this stem.
• Key tense forms — the present continuous (-(I)yor), the aorist (-(A/I)r), the past (-DI), the evidential/reported past (-mIş), and the future (-(y)AcAK).
• Negative and question forms — built with -mA- and the question particle mI.
• The governed case — marked, for example, as (takes -e) for a dative verb.
• Usage notes — common collocations, register, and traps.

Here is what those forms look like for one verb in natural use:

Archiphoneme notation — reading the suffix shapes

Throughout these pages, suffixes are written in archiphoneme notation: capital letters stand for a sound that changes shape depending on the stem, following vowel harmony and consonant rules. This is the standard way Turkish morphology is written, and it lets one symbol cover all four or eight surface forms. The key:

• I = one of ı i u ü (four-way harmony). So -(I)yor surfaces as -ıyor / -iyor / -uyor / -üyor: yapıyor, geliyor, okuyor, gülüyor.
• A = one of a e (two-way harmony). So -DA (locative) surfaces as -da / -de: evde, okulda.
• D = d or t, depending on the preceding consonant: geldi (after voiced l) but yaptı (after voiceless p).
• K = the k that softens to ğ between vowels: -(y)AcAK is gelecek alone but geleceğim with a personal ending.
• (y) and (n) = buffer consonants that appear only when needed to keep two vowels apart: the y in bekle-y-ecek, the n in araba-n-ın.

So when you see -DI in a template, read it as "the past suffix, whose surface form is -dı/-di/-du/-dü or -tı/-ti/-tu/-tü depending on the stem." You never have to memorise eight separate suffixes — you memorise one archiphoneme and let harmony do the rest.

A worked mini-entry: bakmak (to look)

To show how it all fits together, here is a full mini-entry for a single common verb. Notice that the only line you genuinely could not have guessed is the governed case.

And that governed-case line in a real sentence:

Notice that the same verb bakmak means both "look at" and "look after" — and both take the dative. The English preposition (at vs after) is irrelevant; the Turkish case is fixed by the verb.

How to actually use these pages

When you meet a new verb, ask three questions in order:

1. Does it take a non-obvious case? Check the verbs-and-cases table. If it does, store the verb with its case as a single unit — korkmak-tan, inanmak-a — the way you would store a phrasal verb in English.
2. Is it monosyllabic? If so, its aorist vowel is unpredictable; check the aorist vowel table and memorise it. Polysyllabic verbs are safe — they take -Ir automatically.
3. Everything else — continuous, past, future, negative, question — slots straight into the regular template. Don't waste memory on it.

Common mistakes

These are the errors English speakers make most when they treat Turkish verbs like English ones.

Key takeaways

• Turkish conjugation is regular, so these pages spend their attention on what is not predictable: the aorist vowel, the causative allomorph, and the governed case.
• Suffixes are written in archiphoneme notation (-DI, -(I)yor, -(y)AcAK); capital letters stand for sounds that shift with vowel harmony and consonant assimilation.
• Each entry gives the stem, key tense forms, negative/question forms, the governed case, and usage notes.
• Learn every verb together with its governed case as a single inseparable unit — that single habit prevents the most persistent error category in Turkish.