Learning tenses of a Turkish sentence will complete our basic sentence training. At the end of this page you’ll be able to express your action and more importantly make sense.
Let’s start with a table of what English tense compares to what Turkish suffix:
| In English | In Turkish | English use | Turkish use |
| Present tense | Geniş zaman | verb-(e)s | verb-(i,e,ü,ı,a)r |
| Present Continuous | Şimdiki zaman | is/are verb-ing | verb-(ı,i,u,ü)yor |
| Future tense | Gelecek zaman | will verb | verb-(a)cak or (e)cek |
| Past tense | Geçmiş zaman | verb-(e)d or irregular verb | verb-dı, -di, -du, -dü |
We’ll keep it to these for the moment and will cover the more advanced tenses later.
Now let’s see how we use them in actual sentences:
Sen gel-ir-sin = You come
Ben gel-di-m = I came
O koş-uyor = He is running
Onlar kal-acak-lar = They will stay
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The negative sentences are rather simpler in Turkish then in English.
The verb suffix -me gives the whole sentence a negative expression. Of course -me becomes -ma if came after a vowel of similar kind (vowel adaptation will be our next subject. hold on there). This suffix comes right after the verb before the time and personals:
Ben gel-me-di-m = I didn’t come
Sen sat-ma-dı-n = You didn’t sell
O ver-me-yecek = He/She/It will not give (note that -y came in between two front vowels (-e) - more in the next course)
Siz ye-me-di-niz = You didn’t eat