The Infinitive -mAk and the Verb Stem

Every Turkish verb you meet in a dictionary, a wordlist, or a textbook heading is in one shape: the infinitive, ending in -mak or -mek. This is the citation form, the equivalent of English "to come, to take, to see." But the infinitive itself is almost never what you conjugate. To build any actual verb form, you first throw the infinitive ending away and work from what is left — the stem. Getting this one habit right at the very start makes the entire Turkish verb system feel mechanical instead of mysterious.

The infinitive: -mAk

The infinitive ending is written -mAk. The capital A is the two-way harmony vowel: it surfaces as e after a front-vowel stem and a after a back-vowel stem. So there are exactly two shapes — -mek and -mak — and nothing else. There is no third or fourth variant, because -mAk has no consonant that alternates.

Notice that in both of those sentences the infinitive behaves much like an English "to"-verb: gelmek istiyorum "I want to come," almak için "in order to buy." That parallel is a useful first foothold, but it is also where the resemblance ends — because the moment you want to say "I come, I came, I will come," you do not touch the infinitive at all.

The stem: infinitive minus -mAk

The stem is what remains after you remove -mek / -mak. That residue is the real heart of the verb. Every tense suffix, every mood suffix, every voice suffix, and every personal ending attaches to the stem — never to the infinitive.

Once you have the stem, conjugation is just adding pieces in order. Take gel- and watch it grow: gel-iyor-um (I am coming), gel-di-m (I came), gel-ecek-sin (you will come), gel-ir (he comes / it comes). The stem gel- sits there unchanged underneath all of it; only the suffixes after it change.

In okudum "I read (it)," the stem is oku-, the past suffix is -du-, and the personal ending is -m. Strip the layers back and you land exactly on the dictionary form minus -mak. This is the payoff: if you can spot the stem, you can read any conjugated verb backwards to its dictionary entry, and you can build any form forwards from it.

There are essentially no irregular stems

Here is the news that makes Turkish verbs dramatically easier than their English, French, or German counterparts: the stem is always just the infinitive minus -mAk, with no exceptions worth memorising as a beginner. There is no go → went, no be → was → been, no boire → bu. The relationship between the dictionary form and the working stem is perfectly regular for every verb in the language.

Compare what an English learner has to absorb — to be, to go, to do, to have, to take all behave unpredictably — with Turkish, where olmak, gitmek, yapmak, almak all yield their stems by the identical, boring operation: chop off -mak / -mek.

There is one genuinely irregular verb, demek "to say," whose vowel changes in a handful of forms (dedi "he said," diyor "he is saying"), and yemek "to eat" behaves similarly in a couple of spots. These two are real exceptions, and you will learn them as you go — but they are a footnote, not a system. For the other thousands of verbs, the stem is mechanical.

Two changes that are not irregularity

Two things happen at the stem that beginners sometimes mistake for irregularity. Neither one is. Both follow rules you can predict.

First, consonant softening before a vowel. A small set of stems ending in a voiceless consonant soften it when a vowel-initial suffix follows — for example gitmek "to go" has the stem git-, but before the past tense it becomes gid-: gitti keeps the t (the suffix starts with a consonant), while gidiyor softens it (the suffix starts with a vowel). This is the regular stem consonant change, not a new stem to learn.

Second, the stem stays put no matter how long the suffix chain grows. You can stack voice and tense and person — gör-üş-tür-ül-müş-tü — and the original gör- is still right there at the front. Length is not irregularity; it is just agglutination doing its job.

The infinitive -mAk vs. the verbal noun -mA

One last thing to keep straight, because it trips up learners constantly. The infinitive -mAk (with the k) is the dictionary form and is used after certain verbs and in fixed patterns: yüzmek istiyorum "I want to swim," görmek için "in order to see."

There is a separate nominalizer, the verbal noun -mA (without the k), which turns a verb into a noun-like thing that can take case endings and possessives: yüzme "swimming," gelmeni istiyorum "I want you to come" (literally "your coming I-want"). They look almost identical, but -mAk ends the word as an infinitive while -mA opens it up to further noun morphology. The full contrast lives at the verbal noun -mAk; for now, just register that the final k is the difference and it matters.

That single sentence holds both: yüzmek (infinitive, after istemek) and yüzme (verbal noun, the object of bilmek). The meanings shade differently and the morphology after them differs too.

Common mistakes

The first two errors come from treating -mAk as part of the stem; the cure is to delete it before you conjugate. The third is a vowel harmony slip — etmek is front, never etmak. The fourth is the -mAk vs -mA confusion: bilmek in the sense of "to know how to" wants the bare verbal noun.

Key takeaways

• The infinitive -mAk (two shapes only: -mek / -mak by harmony) is the dictionary/citation form: gelmek, almak, görmek.
• To conjugate, delete -mAk to get the stem — gelmek → gel-, okumak → oku-, etmek → et- — and attach every suffix to that stem.
• Turkish has essentially no irregular stems; conjugation is fully mechanical. The only real exceptions are demek and yemek.
• Predictable stem consonant changes (like git- → gid- before a vowel) are not irregularity.
• The infinitive -mAk is distinct from the verbal noun -mA; the final k is the difference, and it changes what morphology can follow.