Lesson 11 — Saat kaç? Time, order and comparing

1Saat kaç? What time is it?

Back in Lesson 3 you learned Saat kaç? whole, along with a promise: we’d take Turkish clocks apart in Lesson 11. Here we are. And we start with good news — a whole hour couldn’t be simpler: saat and the number. That’s the lot.

Half past is buçuk, and it goes after the number — much like saying “three-thirty”. It counts from the hour that’s already come, so there’s nothing to work out.

You know yarım, “half”, from last lesson’s yarım kilo. Yarım saat is “half an hour”. And you’ll often hear just Saat yarım — meaning half past twelve, 12:30. Turks argue about whether that’s proper, but you’ll hear it plenty.

To make it clear whether it’s morning or evening, put the part of the day in front: sabah, akşam, gece — all from Lesson 4. And one new one: öğle, “noon”. After noon is öğleden sonra — Lesson 6’s -dan sonra, word for word the English “afternoon”.

2Üçü beş geçiyor: the minutes

With the minutes, Turkish does one clever thing and one that looks scarier than it is. The clever thing: it describes the clock face exactly as you see it. Before the half, the minutes have gone past the hour — geçiyor, from geçmek, “to pass”, the verb that crossed the bridge in Lesson 5. After the half, there are minutes left before the next hour — and that’s Lesson 2’s var: “to three, there are five minutes”.

Now the endings. The hour you’re heading towards takes -a — Lesson 5’s “to”: üçe, “to three”. The hour you’ve gone past takes -ı, -i, -u or -ü, by harmony, just like mı: üçü. After a vowel, the y steps in again: ikiyi. And that’s the scary-looking bit: this ending has a name — the accusative — and it gets the whole of Lesson 14, where it turns out to do a lot more. For the clock, twelve words are all you need. Here they are — say each pair out loud.

Dört behaves just as it did in Lesson 5: the t softens before a vowel — dördü, dörde. The rest is ordinary harmony.

A quarter is çeyrek, and it works exactly the same way:

If your head’s spinning, that’s normal — everyone’s does. Look at the clock face: hand on the right, geçiyor; on the left, var. Give it a week and you won’t be thinking about it.

3Saat kaçta? At what time?

Saat kaç? asks what time it is now. To ask when something happens, add -ta to kaç — Lesson 2’s locative: kaçta, “at how many”. The answer takes the same ending, with the same harmony and the same t after hard sounds: üçte, dörtte, buçukta.

With minutes, the verb just changes its clothes: geçiyor becomes geçe, var becomes kala. Kala comes from kalmak, “to stay, remain” — the one in Hoşça kalın. “With five minutes remaining to three.”

And two verbs you can’t describe a day without. Kalkmak is “to get up”. Yatmak is “to go to bed”.

Kalkmak has a second meaning you’ll need a lot: buses, trains and ferries “get up” too — that is, they leave.

And now a secret that takes half the weight off. On tickets, timetables and TV, time is on the 24-hour clock, and people just read out the digits: 17.40 is on yedi kırk. The “at” ending sits on the last number: on yedi kırkta. Plenty of people talk like that day to day, too — you need geçe and kala to understand, but to begin with you can speak in digits. Notice the written form: a full stop between hours and minutes.

4Sabahtan akşama kadar: from morning till night

In Lesson 5 you learned “from” and “to”: -dan and -a. Put them side by side, add one word, kadar, and you’ve got a span: “from morning till night”. Kadar means roughly “as far as”. You’ve met it already: Ne kadar? is “as far as what?” — how much. Its other tricks wait for Lesson 17.

Kadar works on its own too, with just the -a: “until”. Kaça kadar? — “until when?”

And it’s the same with distance instead of time:

To say how long something takes, you need sürmek — “to last”. Starting is Lesson 4’s başlamak; ending is bitmek.

5Birinci, ikinci, üçüncü: first, second, third

In Lesson 9, directions went through ilk sokaktan — “from the first street” — because we didn’t have “second street” yet. Now we do. An ordinal is the number plus -ıncı: four versions by harmony, like mı. After a vowel, the first ı drops out and you’re left with -ncı.

Dört softens again: dördüncü. In longer numbers only the last word takes the ending: on birinci, yirmi beşinci. And in writing, a full stop after the digit stands in for the ending: 3. kat is üçüncü kat. Kat, “floor”, you know from Sevim teyze’s üst kat.

İkinci el is literally “second hand” — just as in English. And now a gift English doesn’t have: kaçıncı — “which number?”, “how many-th?”. It’s kaç with the same -ıncı.

İlk and birinci both mean “first”. İlk is first in time: ilk gün, ilk vapur. Birinci is first in a row or a ranking: birinci kat, birinci sınıf. Often either will do, and neither will be wrong.

And one pleasant surprise: dates don’t need ordinals at all. Where English says “the fifth of May”, Turkish says it the way the calendar shows it: beş Mayıs. And “what’s the date today?” is Lesson 8’s izafet: “the month’s how-many?”

6Daha and en: comparing things

Since Lesson 1 you’ve been poured Bir çay daha? — “another tea?”. Daha means “more”. Put it in front of an adjective and you’re comparing: daha büyük, “bigger”. And “the most” is en: en büyük. No endings and not one irregular: iyi — daha iyi — en iyi, “good — better — best”. None of English’s good-better-best business.

Whatever you compare with takes -dan — Lesson 5’s “from”: “taller than Elif” is “from Elif, taller”. With the -dan there, you can even drop daha — the meaning’s already clear.

For “the biggest of all”, bring back Lesson 8’s izafet: Türkiye’nin … şehri, “Türkiye’s city”, with en büyük slipped in between.

For age, Turkish uses büyük and küçük: older is “bigger”, younger is “smaller”. And to say by how much, just put the years in front.

Daha çok is “more”, daha az is “less” (az is “little, not much”). And in last lesson’s clothes shop you can finally ask for a size up.

And four words that are made for comparing:

8Dialogue: which ferry?

Ayşe wants to go to the Adalar on Saturday — the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara, a vapur ride from Istanbul. The ferry calls at four islands in turn, and the furthest is the biggest. All that’s left is agreeing a time with Can. Ada means “island”.

Buluşmak is “to meet up”: buluşalım, “let’s meet”. Geç is “late”, the partner of last lesson’s erken, and geç kalmak is “to be late” — literally “to stay late”. Yani means “I mean, so”: you’ll hear it in every other sentence.

9Reading

Efe’s anneanne, Nermin, arrived from İzmir in Lesson 9, and in Lesson 10 she got Hakan down on the tomatoes. Today she’s going home. The bus is at five — and everyone has their own idea of how long five minutes lasts.

Dünür is the parent of your son- or daughter-in-law — English has no single word for it, though “in-laws” gets close. Hanım after a first name is a polite “Mrs” or “Ms”. Peron is the bay at a bus station, fırın is the oven, and tam means “exactly”.

10The lesson’s new words

Everything new from today, in the order it turned up. The twelve hours in two forms and the ordinals stay in their own grids further up — they’re more use together. Film, kilometre and otobüs aren’t here either: you’ll recognise them anyway.

11Say it yourself

No options here — you build the answer. Read the cue, say it in Turkish out loud, and only then check. You’ll mix up geçiyor and var at some point — great: the miss is what sticks.

12Check yourself

Six items: clocks, “at what time”, floors and comparisons. A miss still shows you the right answer, so there’s no shame in guessing.

13Homework

You learn the clock on a clock — so everything below is out loud, with a real clock face in front of you. If geçiyor and var keep swapping places at first, don’t worry: they do for everyone.