50 most common Turkish verbs

These are the verbs that come up in almost every conversation: at home, in a shop, on the bus, at work. They are listed roughly in the order you'll need them, and the first twenty are already enough to talk about your day.

Each row gives the infinitive, its meaning and two forms for ben (I): the present continuous in -Iyor (gidiyorum, I am going) and the past in -DI (gittim, I went). Read the example aloud, then cover the Turkish and try to say it from the translation.

The case column shows which ending the object or the place takes. Where English uses a preposition, Turkish adds a suffix to the end of the word: okula gidiyorum (I am going to school), otobüsten indim (I got off the bus), babamla konuştum (I talked to my dad). The vowel of the suffix changes to match the word (eve, okula), but the case stays the same. The ending -(y)I appears only when the object is definite: kitabı okudum (I read the book), but kitap okudum (I read a book, I did some reading).