Lesson 5 — Where From, Where To?

1Hello and goodbye: the full set

In Lesson 1 you said hello, gave your name and found out that Güle güle is what the person staying behind says. Today we fill in the rest: how to greet a friend rather than your boss, what to say to “so, how’s it going?”, and how to leave so the right words follow you out the door.

Ne var ne yok is built out of two words from Lesson 2: var and yok. Literally, “what’s there and what isn’t?”. Nobody wants the full inventory — İyilik sağlık, and you’re off.

And Kolay gelsin is worth taking home today. You say it to anyone in the middle of a job: the man stacking tomatoes, the neighbour halfway through a renovation, someone hunched over a laptop. English has nothing like it, which is exactly why it lands. Say it to a waiter and watch his face.

Now the goodbyes — and here Turkish wants to know which side of the door you’re on. The one leaving says one thing, the one staying says another.

Hoşça kal literally means “stay pleasantly”. And the Güle güle you get back is “go laughing”. So it’s a little exchange across the doorstep: one wishes the other a good stay, the other wishes a good going.

2Asking with a verb: geliyor musun?

In Lesson 4 every question hung on a question word: Ne yapıyorsun?, Kaç dil biliyorsun? There was no way to ask a plain “are you coming?”. Now there is, and there’s almost nothing new to learn: it’s Lesson 2’s particle mı, put after the -yor.

Remember how in Lesson 2 the personal ending moved onto the particle: doktor muyum?, öğrenci misin? Same thing here. The verb stops at -yor, and the “who” moves onto the mu, as a separate word.

And now a present — the second one -yor has handed you. It never changes and always ends in an “o”, so the particle after it never changes either: it’s always mu. No picking between mı/mi/mu/mü here — every verb in this tense takes mu.

One exception, and it makes sense. With onlar the -lar stays on the verb and the particle comes after it — where it listens to harmony again: geliyorlar mı? And if you leave the -lar off, which you’ll remember is allowed, it’s simply geliyor mu?

The stress lands on the syllable just before the particle: geliYOR musun? The mu itself is unstressed and slips past. And you answer with the whole verb — no var needed.

And one trap. If the question already has a question word in it — ne, nerede, kaç — leave the mu out. The word is doing the asking; a particle would turn one question into two.

3“Aren’t you…?” The negative question

It sounds fearsome and it’s about as simple as it gets. Take last lesson’s negative and put the question you’ve just learned after it: gelmiyor + musun. That’s it.

You reach for it when you’re surprised — “you’re not coming?”. Or when you’re offering something, because in Turkish this is a very soft way to invite. Çay içmiyor musun? — “won’t you have some tea?”. A host who asks it like that isn’t really expecting a no, as Lesson 1 may have taught you already.

And here’s where last lesson’s hiç earns its keep. In a question like this it adds honest astonishment.

The present tense now has all four of its forms. Here they are side by side, one verb, for “you”. Two switches do all the work: -mi- inside the word for “not”, and mu after it for a question. Read them out loud from the top.

4Where, where to, where from: the three cases of place

Back in Lesson 2 you found out Turkish has no prepositions, and you got your first ending of place: -da, “where”. It has two siblings — one answers “where to?”, the other “where from?”. Between the three of them they cover nearly everything you can do with a place: be there, go there, come away from there.

The questions all grow from one root: nerede — where, nereye — where to, nereden — where from. For people it’s the same: kimde — who has it, kime — to whom, kimden — from whom.

And one detail about -da that Lesson 2 left for today. It behaves itself with the pronouns, except that o picks up an n before the ending: onda — “he’s got it”. That n will turn up on o in front of all three cases.

5Where from? -dan / -den / -tan / -ten

Good news: you nearly know this one already. Take Lesson 2’s -da and add an n. Everything else — four variants, harmony, the voiceless consonants of Fıstıkçı Şahap — works exactly the same way.

No surprises with the pronouns — except that same o with its n.

The commonest reason you’ll need it is the question you get asked two minutes into meeting anyone. Word for word it’s “where are you coming from?”, and it means “where are you from?”.

And a few verbs that insist on “from” where English wouldn’t dream of it. In Turkish you’re scared FROM something. You like FROM someone, too. There’s no point arguing with it — just learn a couple of examples whole.

Careful with Senden hoşlanıyorum: it isn’t “you’re a nice person”, it’s “I like you” in that sense. And almak, “to take, to buy”, always wonders where the thing came from: the market, the shop, Ali. The verbs that take you out of a place go here too: leaving the house, getting off the ferry.

6Where to? -a / -e

The third case is the shortest: a single vowel. And harmony is back to two teams here, like -lar/-ler in Lesson 1 — -a after back vowels, -e after front ones.

The ending starts with a vowel, and Turkish won’t let two vowels sit together. So after a vowel the familiar buffer y slides in again.

The second quirk is one you’ve met too. Remember gitmek turning into gidiyorum? A voiceless consonant that ends up in front of a vowel goes soft. Same here: if a word is longer than one syllable and ends in p, ç, t or k, they become b, c, d and ğ before -a/-e.

Short one-syllable words usually leave it alone: süt → süte, top → topa. And notice that -da and -dan never cause it — sokakta, sokaktan — because they start with a consonant. The softening only happens when a vowel comes straight after.

The pronouns have one surprise: ben and sen change their vowel — bana, sana. The rest behave themselves, and o picks up its n as usual.

The verbs of motion — gitmek, gelmek — take “where to”, no surprises there. But bakmak, “to look”, wants -a/-e as well: in Turkish you always look TO somewhere. And binmek, “to get on” a bus or a boat, belongs here too.

Karaköy’den Kadıköy’e — “from Karaköy to Kadıköy”. Two cases, two words, and there’s your route. Which is exactly the route coming up next.

8Dialogue: fancy meeting you here

Ayşe and Can bump into each other by the pier. The greetings from the first section, questions with mu, and all three cases — in one short conversation. Plus a small worry about Deniz.

9Reading

Deniz moved in in Lesson 1, lost his key in Lesson 2, was handed Friday in Lesson 3 and found his tongue over a backgammon board in Lesson 4. Today he crosses to the other side for the first time — and meets Istanbul’s most shameless resident. The text is everything you know so far, plus today’s questions and cases.

10The lesson’s new words

Everything new from today, in the order it turned up. The greetings and goodbyes aren’t here: they’re set phrases and they’re better off whole, in the first section. Verbs are in their dictionary form.

11Say it yourself

No options to pick from here — you build the answer. Read the cue, say it in Turkish out loud, and only then check. Got it wrong? Good — that’s exactly how it sticks. Peeking first doesn’t help: then you’re practising recognising, not speaking.

12Check yourself

Six items: ferry-going Istanbul, the goodbye across the doorstep, and the three cases. A miss still shows you the right answer, so there’s no shame in guessing.

13Homework

Cases, like verbs, don’t go in through the eyes. Everything below is arranged so you say as many “from”s and “to”s out loud as possible. Mixing up -da and -dan at first is normal — everyone does — and it passes sooner than you’d think.