How To Master The Simple Past Tense In Turkish Fast

If you’ve started learning Turkish, you’ll no doubt eventually come across the Turkish simple past tense. But did you know that there are a range of different ways to express the past tense with unique, nuanced meanings? 

Learning the past tense in Turkish might feel pretty daunting because Turkish is heavy on suffixes for sentence structure.

But luckily, the Turkish simple past tense follows a pretty consistent pattern! By learning the past tense, you’ll be conversing in the streets of Istanbul and with pals in no time. 

So let’s dig right into learning how to form the Turkish simple past tense. 

Basic Verb Structure In Turkish

But before jumping into the different past tenses, you’ll first need to be able to recognise Turkish verbs. Without learning this, it’ll be tricky to transition into using different past tenses. 

In Turkish, all verbs have an infinitive form, which is the form that any verb takes before you conjugate and add new meanings to them.

In English, for example you might see phrases like “to come” or “to go”, all verbs that begin with the preposition “to”. These are all the infinitive forms of English verbs. 

Now if you're looking to identify the infinitive form of verbs in Turkish, all you have to look for is whether the word ends in -mek or -mak.

The sounds that come before –mek or –mak will be the foundation from which you do Turkish verb conjugation, also known as the verb root.

For example: 

• gelmek  (to come)
• okumak  (to read)
• gitmek   (to go)
• kalkmak  (to stand)

You might wonder why some verbs end with -mek while others end with -mak. The answer is that the Turkish language is built on vowel harmony. This means that the vowels used before determine which vowel comes next. 

There’s a simple formula that you can follow for this: 

• If the preceding vowel is either e, i, ö, or ü, then your infinitive verb will end with “-mek”. 
• If the preceding vowel is either a, ı, o, or u, then your infinitive verb will end with “-mak”. 

Turkish Simple Past Tense

The Turkish simple past tense is the most simple way of saying that something happened in the past. To express a sentence in the simple past tense, all you need to do is add the suffix –di. 

Going back to the four verb examples we shared before, here are some examples of how you might express them in the simple past tense: 

• geldi (He/she/it came) 
• okudu (He/she/it read)
• gitti (He/she/it went)
• kalktı (He/she/it stood)

You might be wondering why each of these simple past tense suffixes are spelt out in a different way. Again, the answer is in vowel harmony!

Here is a simple guide on vowel harmony for the simple past tense: 

• If the preceding vowel is an “e” or “i”, then you will use –di or -ti
• If the preceding vowel is an “a” or “ı”, then you will use –dı or -tı 
• If the preceding vowel is an “o” or “u”, then you will use -du or -tu
• If the preceding vowel is an “ö” or “ü”, then you will use –dü or tü

But hold on, you might also be wondering why sometimes, the suffix will start with the letter “d” while in other cases, it starts with the letter “t”. This is because of another phenomenon called consonant harmony. 

Consonant harmony is where the preceding consonant in a verb determines the consonant that comes with the suffix.

Here’s a simple guide: 

• If the verb ends with the consonant “f”, “h”, “k”, “p”, “ç”, “s”, “ş”, or “t”, then the suffix for the past tense verb will either be -ti/tı/tu/tü
• If the verb ends with any other consonant or a vowel, then the suffix for the past tense verb will either be –di/dı/du/dü

So going back to our example verbs from before, this is why gelmek (to come) and okumak (to read) are conjugated as geldi (he/she/it came) or okudu (he/she/it read), while gitmek (to go) and kalkmak (to stand) are conjugated as gitti (he/she/it went) or kalktı (he/she/it stood). 

While this might all sound really tricky, it really isn’t when you try to speak! When you sound these verbs out, you’ll likely find that these sounds will naturally flow out automatically and that it will feel right in your mouth. That’s the magic of vowel and consonant harmony. 

Simple Past Tense With Different Pronouns

Now that you’re an expert on how to form a simple past tense verb in Turkish, you might be wondering how to conjugate this for different pronouns like “I”, “you”, “we” or “they”. 

There are six different pronouns in Turkish, and each has a different rule for forming verbs. Like everything else in Turkish, it’s all in the suffixes.

Here’s a simple formula: 

• Pronoun + verb root + past tense suffix + pronoun suffix

What does this mean in practice? Well, here’s a simple table to make sense of this. 

One of the most common mistakes for English speakers is skipping the pronoun suffix when forming a verbal sentence, since pronoun suffixes for verbs don’t exist in English. But this is incorrect and will be interpreted as a sure sign that you don’t understand Turkish. 

In fact, the pronoun suffix is so important that you could even forgo using the pronoun before the verb and only use the pronoun suffix if you prefer, and it would still be correct.

For example: 

• Kitap okudun. (You read a book.) 
• Okula gittik. (We went to school.)

Note that these two sentences don’t begin with sen (you) or biz (we) respectively. You can assume that these sentences refer to “you” or “we” by the pronoun suffixes alone. 

Here are a couple more examples of sentences in the simple past tense. Do you think you can pick out the pronouns, verb roots, and the past tense and pronoun suffixes?: 

• Çocuk bir oyuncakla oynadı. (The child played with a toy.)
• Soğuk bir içecek içtim. (I drank a cold drink.)
• Biz pilav yaptık. (We made pilaf.)
• Soru sordular. (They asked a question.)

Simple Past Tense In The Negative

You may be wondering at this point how you could say that you didn’t do something in the past tense, or how to form a simple past tense sentence in the negative. Thankfully, it’s pretty simple! And surprise, surprise: it’s time to introduce you to another suffix! 

The suffix for turning a verb into the negative is –me/–ma. This is inserted in between the verb root and the past tense suffix, –di in a sentence. So the new formula becomes: 

• Pronoun + verb root + negative suffix + past tense suffix + pronoun suffix

Let’s make sense of this by going back to the table shared before: 

To help make better sense of this, here are the sentences from before that have been turned into the negative

• Çocuk bir oyuncakla oynamadı. (The child didn’t play with a toy.)
• Soğuk bir içecek içmedi. (I didn’t drink a cold drink.)
• Biz pilav yapmadık. (We didn’t make pilaf.)
• Soru sormadılar. (They didn’t ask a question.)

You might have noticed that the spelling of the past tense suffixes changed in these sentences. That’s because the vowel and the consonants coming before the past tense suffix changed by adding the negative suffix (-me/-ma). This in turn changed the spelling of the following past tense suffix. 

For example, you might say içtim (I drank) using a past tense suffix that starts with the letter “t” because it comes after the letter “ç”.

But by adding the negative suffix -me here in the sentence içmedim (I didn’t drink), the past tense suffix changes to start with the letter “d” because it now comes after the letter “e”. 

FAQs About The Turkish Simple Past Tense

Time To Practice The Turkish Simple Past Tense At Home!

As you can see, everything in Turkish comes down to knowing the right suffixes, including for speaking in the Turkish simple past tense. 

While it may seem difficult to string together the different suffixes, all while paying attention to vowel and consonant harmony, you can set yourself up for success by following the simple formulas for forming sentences in the Turkish simple past tense. 

Alternatively, skip the formulas and try sounding out these sentences yourself at home! By practicing sounding these sentences out, you’ll notice how these suffixes fall into place in your mouth. 

Or better yet, use the StoryLearning method® to practice reading real Turkish texts, like Turkish books or short stories in Turkish, so that you can recognise the Turkish simple past tense and start forming your own sentences. 

Good luck practising!