Present Continuous: Full Paradigm and Negative/Question

This is the drill page for the present continuous. If you have already met the -(I)yor suffix and want to see one verb fully conjugated through all six persons in all three forms — affirmative, negative, and question — this is where you lock it in. The two things English speakers trip over are not the affirmative endings at all; they are the vowel that appears in the negative and the place the personal ending lands in the question. Seeing the three columns next to each other is the fastest way to fix both.

We will use gelmek (“to come”) as the model verb throughout, and then show how a back-vowel and a rounded-vowel verb behave, because the suffix vowel changes with harmony.

The affirmative paradigm

The recipe is: stem + -(I)yor + Type-1 personal ending. The vowel inside -Iyor is almost always written -i- for front-unrounded stems like gel-, giving geliyor-. Then you bolt on the standard Type-1 endings: -um, -sun, -∅, -uz, -sunuz, -lar.

Notice the personal-ending vowels are -u- (geliyorum, geliyoruz, geliyorsun), not -i-. That is because the -or of -yor is itself a rounded, back-ish vowel, and the endings harmonise to it — the -yor suffix is a frozen exception that always carries an o, so the endings after it round. This is why it is never geliyorım or geliyorim.

A quick word on what -(I)yor actually means, because it is broader than English “-ing”. It covers the action happening right now (şu an geliyorum, “I'm coming right now”), but also a temporary ongoing situation (bu sene Ankara'da çalışıyorum, “I'm working in Ankara this year”) and even some scheduled near-future plans (yarın geliyorum, “I'm coming tomorrow”). So the same six forms below serve several jobs that English splits across “I am coming”, “I'm working”, and “I'm coming tomorrow” — context, not a different tense, tells them apart.

The negative paradigm — and the vowel that raises

Here is the single most important fact on this page. The negative is built by inserting -mA- (negation) before -yor. But -yor cannot follow an a or e — the a/e gets squeezed out and raised to a high vowel. So gel- + me + yor does not stay as gelmeyor; the e raises to i, giving gelmiyor.

The raised vowel follows four-way harmony based on the stem:

Now the full negative paradigm of gelmek:

The question paradigm — where the person hides

To ask a yes/no question, you split the question particle mI off as a separate word and the personal ending jumps onto mI, not onto the verb. So the verb itself ends at -yor, and the person is carried by muyum, musun, mu, muyuz, musunuz. The third-person plural is the odd one out: -lar stays glued to the verb (geliyorlar mı).

Because -yor ends in a rounded back vowel, the particle harmonises to mu.

The negative question simply combines both columns — raised vowel on the verb, person on the particle:

How this differs from English

English marks the continuous with a separate auxiliary (“am / is / are”) plus -ing, and it negates with a third word (“not”): I am not coming is three words. Turkish folds all of that into one word, gelmiyorum, where -mi- is the “not”, -yor is the “-ing”, and -um is the “I am”. That compactness is why the negative vowel matters so much: in English you can mangle the spelling of “not” and still be understood, but in Turkish the negation lives in a single buried vowel, so getting -mi- right is getting the “not” right.

English speakers also expect the question word (“am”, “is”, “are”) at the front. In Turkish nothing moves to the front — the particle mI stays after the verb and only the intonation and that little word signal a question.

One more contrast worth naming: a single stem ending in a vowel takes the buffer that you can already hear in the model. When the stem ends in a vowel, -yor attaches directly and the stem's final vowel raises — oku- (“read”) becomes okuyor, not okuyuyor, and bekle- (“wait”) becomes bekliyor, not bekleyor. So the same raising you see in the negative (gelme- → gelmiyor) also happens to ordinary vowel-final stems in the affirmative. Either way, the principle is identical: an a/e never survives directly in front of -yor.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Affirmative: stem + -(I)yor
  • rounded endings (-um, -sun, -∅, -uz, -sunuz, -lar) → geliyorum, geliyorsun, geliyor, geliyoruz, geliyorsunuz, geliyorlar.
• Negative: -mA raises to a high vowel before -yor → gelmiyor, yapmıyor, okumuyor, görmüyor. Never write -meyor or -mayor.
• Question: the verb stops at -yor; the person rides on the mI particle → geliyor muyum? geliyor musun? Only onlar keeps -lar on the verb: geliyorlar mı?
• Negative question just stacks both rules: gelmiyor muyum?