The Regular Verb Template

This is the single most useful page in the verb reference. It shows that one template — one ordered set of suffix slots — generates every regular Turkish verb. There is no list of irregular conjugations to memorise the way there is in English or Spanish. Learn the slots once, and you can produce any tense of any regular verb on demand. Below, the template is filled in completely for yapmak ("to do/make") and gelmek ("to come"), a back-vowel verb and a front-vowel verb, so you can see harmony working in both directions.

The idea: slots, not words

A Turkish verb is built like a train. The stem is the engine; each grammatical meaning is a carriage that clips on in a fixed order. To conjugate, you don't recall a memorised word — you assemble carriages:

stem + (negation) + tense/aspect + (person)

Because the order is fixed and the suffixes are regular, the only work your brain does is vowel harmony (choosing a/e or ı/i/u/ü) and a couple of buffer consonants (y and n) that appear to keep vowels apart. Master those two mechanics and the template runs itself.

The orthography you must apply in every slot

Two mechanical adjustments recur across the whole template:

• Vowel harmony. The A archiphoneme picks a after a back vowel (yapacak) and e after a front vowel (gelecek). The I archiphoneme picks one of ı i u ü (yapıyor, geliyor, okuyor, gülüyor).
• Buffer consonants. A y slides in to separate two vowels — bekle-y-ecek, yapma-y-acak. The (y)AcAK future also softens its final k to ğ before a vowel-initial ending: geleceğim, yapacağım.

You will see these at work in every row below.

The full template

Here are the twelve core slots. X stands for any stem; the form is shown with the third-person singular (the bare suffix) unless person is the point of the slot.

Full conjugation: yapmak (to do/make)

A back-vowel stem, so every A surfaces as a and every I as ı.

Note two things in the yapmak table. The future yapacak softens to yapacağım once a personal ending follows. And the negative aorist is yapmaz (3rd sg.), not yapmazır — the aorist negative drops the aorist vowel entirely, a quirk worth flagging now so it never surprises you. The abilitative negative is yapamaz, contracting yapa-ma- into yapama-.

Full conjugation: gelmek (to come)

A front-vowel stem, so every A surfaces as e and every I as i. Same slots, mirror-image vowels. Note that gelmek is one of the thirteen irregular-aorist monosyllables: its aorist is gelir, not geler.

The gelmek column shows the buffer y clearly: the first-person optative geleyim and gelmeyeyim both insert y to keep the optative -(y)A- away from the stem-final or negation vowel. And gelecek → geleceğim again softens k to ğ.

The one habit that makes the template automatic

When you meet a new verb, never ask "how is this verb conjugated?" — ask only "which vowel set?" Decide back (a/ı) or front (e/i/ü) from the stem's last vowel, then pour the suffixes into the slots. The verb görmek ("to see") rounds to front-rounded vowels (görüyor, göreceğim, görsün); okumak ("to read") is back-rounded (okuyor, okuyacak, okusun). The slots never change.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• One ordered set of suffix slots conjugates every regular Turkish verb — there is no irregular-conjugation list to memorise.
• The only per-form work is vowel harmony (a/e and ı/i/u/ü) and the buffer consonants y and n.
• The future -(y)AcAK softens its final k to ğ before a vowel-initial ending: geleceğim, yapacağım.
• The negative aorist drops the aorist vowel — gelmez, yapmaz — and the negative abilitative contracts to gelemez, yapamaz.
• Learn yapmak and gelmek cold, and every other regular verb is just a stem swap with the vowels flipped.