Breakdown of O her zaman mutlu görünüyor, oysa hayatı çok karmaşık.
o
that / he / she / it
mutlu
happy
çok
very
zaman
time
Questions & Answers about O her zaman mutlu görünüyor, oysa hayatı çok karmaşık.
Why use oysa here, and could I use halbuki instead?
Oysa connects two contrasting ideas, much like "whereas," "however," or "but." You could absolutely use halbuki here instead with no change in meaning. Both emphasize the surprising difference between how he looks (happy) and his actual reality (complicated).
How does görünüyor relate to the verb görmek (to see)?
It is built from görmek (to see). When you add the suffix -ün, it creates the verb görünmek, which means "to be seen" or "to seem/appear." So mutlu görünüyor means "he appears happy."
Why is there an -ı at the end of hayatı?
The base word is hayat (life). The -ı is the third-person possessive suffix, making it "his life" (or "her life"). Even though the sentence doesn't explicitly say onun (his), the -ı suffix tells us whose life it is, linking back to the O (he) at the beginning.
Where is the verb "is" for the second half of the sentence?
In Turkish, the third-person "to be" (is/are) is often omitted. You could technically write karmaşıktır, adding the "to be" suffix -tır, but leaving it as just the adjective karmaşık is extremely common and completely correct for saying "is complicated."