Learn Turkish: Denize yakın küçük bir pansiyonda kaldık. - We stayed at a small guesthouse close to the sea.

The adjective yakın (close/near) always requires the word it relates to to be in the dative case (the direction toward something). Just like in English where we say "close TO the sea," Turkish says denize yakın.

Why does bir come after küçük instead of before it?

In Turkish, the indefinite article bir (a/an) normally goes right before the noun, after any adjectives. So "a small guesthouse" is küçük bir pansiyon. If you put it first (bir küçük pansiyon), it places heavy emphasis on the number, sounding more like "ONE small guesthouse."

How do we know to use -da at the end of pansiyonda?

The locative case suffix means "in," "on," or "at." We look at the last vowel of pansiyon, which is "o" (a back vowel), so we use the back-vowel suffix -da. If the word ended in a voiceless, hard consonant (like p, t, k, or s), it would have changed to -ta, but "n" is a voiced consonant so the "d" stays soft.

This lesson focuses on the future tense, but kaldık is past tense. How would we change it to "we will stay" using our new rules?