Learn Turkish: Öğretmen iyi ki gelmedi, kimse ders çalışmıyordu. - Fortunately the teacher didn't come, nobody was studying.

İyi ki translates to 'fortunately' or 'it is a good thing that.' As you can see with gelmedi (didn't come), iyi ki simply goes in front of a regular, fully conjugated verb. You don't need any special suffixes on the verb to connect them.

If kimse already means 'nobody,' why does the verb çalışmıyordu have a negative suffix?

Turkish requires double negatives for words like kimse (nobody/anybody) or hiç (nothing/none). To say 'nobody was studying,' you must pair kimse with a negative verb. Using a positive verb here would be grammatically incorrect.

Can you break down the suffixes in çalışmıyordu?

This is the past continuous tense, used for ongoing actions in the past. It breaks down as the verb root çalış + the negative suffix mı + the continuous marker yor + the past tense suffix du.

Why is ders used here instead of just saying the verb?

On its own, the verb çalışmak usually means 'to work' (like at a job or on a task). To specifically say 'to study' in an academic sense, Turkish uses the set phrase ders çalışmak (literally, 'to work a lesson').