Turkish Past Continuous: -iyordu ("was doing")

Some past moments aren’t single completed events - they’re a scene already underway when something else happens, or an action caught mid-motion. English handles this with “was/were

• -ing.” Turkish handles it by taking a tense you likely already know, the present continuous -iyor, and simply pushing it into the past.

What this tense does

The past continuous describes an action that was in progress at a specific moment in the past - often one interrupted by, or running alongside, something else:

• Ben kitap okuyordum. - I was reading a book.
• Telefon çaldığında yemek yapıyordum. - I was cooking when the phone rang.
• Dışarıda yağmur yağıyordu. - It was raining outside.

This is different from both the simple past -di (a single completed event, with a clear start and end) and the past habitual -erdi (a routine repeated across many occasions, not one moment). The past continuous is specifically a snapshot: one action, caught at the exact instant it was happening.

Forming it

The past continuous stacks two familiar pieces: the present continuous suffix -iyor (with its own four-way vowel harmony, -ıyor/-iyor/-uyor/-üyor, depending on the stem’s last vowel) and the past copula -du, which attaches directly after it with ordinary four-way harmony of its own - but since -iyor always ends in the rounded vowel o or ü, the copula that follows it is always -du or -dü, never -dı or -di:

The personal endings then attach after the copula, exactly as they do in the simple past:

As with other compound tenses, the plural marker for onlar attaches to -iyor itself before the past copula (geliyorlardı), and it’s also common - and equally correct - to drop that plural marker entirely on the verb when the subject pronoun already shows the plural: Onlar geliyordu works just as well as Onlar geliyorlardı.

Exceptions worth knowing

Negation inserts -mı-/-mi-/-mu-/-mü- directly after the stem and before -yor, following the stem’s own vowel rather than reusing the -iyor vowel. Gel- (come) negates to gel-mi-yor-, giving gelmiyordu (“he/she wasn’t coming”); oku- (read) negates to oku-mu-yor-, giving okumuyordu (“he/she wasn’t reading”). The negative vowel harmonizes with the stem’s last vowel, just like the affirmative -iyor vowel does - the two just happen to usually match, since both look at the same stem.

Questions place the particle mı/mi/mu/mü as a separate word right after the -iyor form, and the past copula and personal ending move onto that particle instead of staying on the verb. Sen geliyor muydun? (“Were you coming?”) keeps the bare continuous form geliyor on the verb, while muydun (mu + idi + -n) carries both the past tense and the person marker.

A handful of common verb stems change shape before any vowel-initial suffix, including -iyor, even though they look regular everywhere else. Gitmek (“to go”) shifts its stem to gid- before -iyor, so the past continuous is gidiyordu (“he/she was going”), never gitiyordu. This same stem change also shows up in the plain present continuous, covered in its own lesson - the past continuous just inherits it automatically, since it’s built on top of the same -iyor form.

Examples

• Ben dün bu saatte uyuyordum. - I was sleeping at this time yesterday.
• Sen kapıyı çaldığında ne yapıyordun? - What were you doing when you knocked on the door?
• O bizi bekliyordu. - He/she was waiting for us.
• Biz konuşurken çocuklar bahçede oynuyordu. - While we were talking, the children were playing in the garden.
• Siz o sırada hâlâ çalışıyor muydunuz? - Were you (all) still working at that time? (question)
• Onlar o gün bizi dinlemiyordu. - They weren’t listening to us that day. (negative)

Each sentence freezes one action mid-progress at a past moment - several of them anchored to a second event (a knock at the door, a conversation) happening at the very same time.

Try it yourself

Babi, Speafy’s AI tutor, will have you describe what you were doing at the exact moment something else happened, then flip the same sentence into the negative and question forms so the mı/mi/mu/mü particle’s position stops needing a conscious check, and Speafy’s FSRS-based flashcards keep irregular stems like gid- (from gitmek) reviewed often enough that the shift stays automatic in the past tense too.