Turkish verbs
A Turkish verb is a stem with endings, and the endings follow rules with hardly an exception. What you cannot see from a verb are two things: which aorist it takes, and whether its stem softens before a vowel. Those two are given here for every verb.
One stem, many endings
In the dictionary every verb ends in -mek or -mak: gelmek “to come”, yapmak “to do, to make”. Without that ending you have the stem — gel-, yap- —, and everything else is attached to it, one suffix after another: the tense, the negation, the question, the person. Where English needs four words (“I am not coming”), Turkish needs one (gelmiyorum). Each suffix comes in two or four shapes, and the last vowel of the stem decides which. In the present tense in -iyor it looks like this:
| Person | gelmek | yapmak | okumak |
|---|---|---|---|
| ben | geliyorum | yapıyorum | okuyorum |
| sen | geliyorsun | yapıyorsun | okuyorsun |
| o | geliyor | yapıyor | okuyor |
| biz | geliyoruz | yapıyoruz | okuyoruz |
| siz | geliyorsunuz | yapıyorsunuz | okuyorsunuz |
| onlar | geliyorlar | yapıyorlar | okuyorlar |
The -iyor itself never changes; only its first vowel follows the stem: geliyor, yapıyor, okuyor, görüyor. So for the 406 verbs on this page you do not get the whole table, only what cannot be worked out: the aorist (gelir, yapar) and the present tense where the stem softens before the vowel (gitmek → gidiyor).
The typical English trap
The verb goes at the end of the sentence — not straight after the subject as in English. Building from English, you put it second and hang the rest on behind it.
The check: if a word still follows the verb, it almost always belongs in front of it. And the ben can go — the ending -um already says who is learning.
The second trap: the aorist of the thirteen
A one-syllable stem ending in a consonant takes -ar or -er in the aorist: yapar, içer, sever. Thirteen frequent verbs do not keep to this and take -ir, -ır, -ur or -ür instead — among them gelir, alır, bilir, olur and görür. Say geler by the rule and you will be understood and still sound wrong. These thirteen are the only ones worth learning by heart; they have a group of their own below.
Where to go from here
How a verb builds its forms is above. When to use which tense — -iyor or the aorist, -di or -miş — is the question of the tenses, and that has a page of its own. This one stops on purpose before it becomes a poor copy of it.
The 2 grammar topics around the verb
Each with an explanation, a form table, example sentences and exercises of its own.
Practise 495 verbs
The verbs from the core vocabulary, across all the topic lists.