Lesson 16 — Yolun yarısını geçtik! Past the halfway mark

1Yolun yarısını geçtik! Past the halfway mark

Fifteen lessons behind you — that’s more than half of Course 1. So there’s no new grammar today. We’ll stop, look back and take stock of how much you’re already carrying. Spoiler: a lot more than it feels like.

Start with the title. Yolun yarısını geçtik — “we’re past the halfway mark”, literally “we’ve passed the half of the road”. Three words, and half the book is at work inside them: yolun is Lesson 7’s genitive, yarısı Lesson 8’s izafet, the n before the case is Lesson 7 again, -ı is Lesson 14’s accusative, and geçtik is Lesson 5’s geçmek in Lesson 13’s past. In Lesson 1 it would have been a string of letters. Now you can take it apart piece by piece.

While we’re at it, meet a new “half”. Turkish has three, and you know two of them. Yarım goes before a noun: yarım kilo, yarım porsiyon. Buçuk goes after a number: iki buçuk. And yarı is the half itself, as a thing: yolun yarısı, “half of the road”. You’ll meet it again in the culture corner.

2Tanışalım: questions you can already answer

Picture a tea garden. There’s a Turkish family at the next table, and five minutes later you’ve all got talking. Here are the questions you’re almost certain to be asked. Each comes from one of our lessons; together they make a whole conversation. Try to make each one out before you open the translation.

The answers are already yours too. The main rule is Lesson 6’s: the question word sits where the answer will go. Swap it out and you’re done — nothing else moves. Just don’t mix up Nerelisiniz?, where you’re from, and Neredesiniz?, where you are right now.

İş is “work, a job”; öğretmen is “teacher”, from Lesson 4’s öğretmek, “to teach”. Not a teacher? Now’s the moment to look up your own job and answer for yourself — out loud.

3One verb, a dozen jobs

Now let’s line up every verb form you’ve got on a single verb: gelmek, “to come”. Look how much it can already do. The brackets say which lesson each form comes from — if one has slipped away, that’s where to look.

Two rules hold the whole dozen together. First: the negative comes straight after the stem, before anything else — gelmiyorum, gelmedin, gelme. Second, the one everybody mixes up: where mi goes. With -yor it comes before the person — geliyor musun? With -dı it comes after the person, right at the end — geldin mi? Say both aloud a few times in a row; your ear will hold on to it faster than your eye.

And remember the past isn’t only for verbs (Lesson 13): hasta — hastaydım, “I was ill”; evde — evdeydim, “I was at home”. And here mi hooks on to the word: hasta mıydın? evde miydin?

4One word, a whole train

Nouns work the same way: one word, lots of carriages. And they always couple up in the same order — plural first, then “my/our”, then the case. Ev-ler-imiz-de: “in our houses”. The order never changes, so every ending’s place is known in advance.

Between the carriages you sometimes need a coupling — a little letter that stops two vowels crashing into each other. There are only three, and you know them all. Y goes between vowels: kapıya, Ayşe’yi, suyu. S is for “his/her” after a vowel: arabası. And n comes after that -sı, before a case — arabasında, arabasını — and in the genitive after a vowel: Ayşe’nin.

And two rules for consonants. When a vowel follows k, p, ç or t, they soften (Lesson 7): çocuk → çocuğu, kitap → kitabı, ağaç → ağacı, dört → dördü. Short one-syllable words usually hold firm: top → topu. And the other way round there’s Fıstıkçı Şahap (Lessons 2 and 13): after f, s, t, k, ç, ş, h or p an ending starts with t instead of d — kitapta, gittim, baktım.

And last, the thing everything else rests on: vowel harmony. Every ending plays one of two games — two teams or four. Here’s who’s where.

Don’t learn this list by heart. Say one word with each ending out loud, and you’ll hear that your ear has been choosing on its own for a while now.

6Dialogue: a quiz from the sofa

Saturday evening. There’s a quiz on TV, and Ayşe and Can answer along with the contestants — out loud, and against each other. The questions, as luck would have it, come from our earlier lessons. Play along.

Sunucu is the host, cevap an answer, doğru cevap the right answer. Yüzyıl is a century — literally “a hundred years”: you know both yüz and yıl. Açmak is “to open”, a relative of açık. Hatırlamak is “to remember”, from the very hatır in the coffee proverb. Berabere is “a draw”: Lesson 12’s beraber plus -e. And Sonra “önce” dedim is Can wriggling out with a pun: “after that, I said ‘before’”.

7Reading

Friday, the end of term. Sevim teyze’s grandchildren, Zeynep and Ali, come home from school with their report cards. Four-year-old Efe doesn’t get one: he’s too young for school. But Efe doesn’t give up that easily.

Aferin is “well done” — what you say to children, and to grown-ups who’ve earned it. Not is a mark, matematik is maths, and beden eğitimi is PE — literally “body education”: beden is the clothes size from Lesson 10, but really it means “body”. And Sevim teyze said Bayramda herkes çocuk to Deniz back in Lesson 7 — with ten lira that time, too.

8The lesson’s new words

Everything new from today, in the order it turned up. There isn’t much: this lesson is about what you already know. The forms of gelmek and ev aren’t here — you build those yourself.

9Say it yourself

One last lap before the report card. Everything here is from earlier lessons, so there are no hints. Say it aloud, then check. A miss isn’t a bad mark — it’s a pointer to where to go back to.

10Check yourself

And here’s your karne. Six items on everything so far. A miss shows you the right answer, so this is a report card that teaches as well.

11Homework

Today was all review, so the homework is about you. Everything out loud.