Turkish Past Habitual: -erdi / -ırdı ("used to")

English has a dedicated phrase for talking about a past routine that’s no longer true - “I used to run every morning,” “She would always call on Sundays.” Turkish does the same job without adding a new suffix from scratch: it reuses a tense you already know (the aorist, Turkish’s “general truths and habits” tense) and simply places it in the past.

What this tense does

The past habitual describes an action that was someone’s regular custom, repeated behavior, or general state over a stretch of past time - not a single completed event, and not something happening at one specific past moment:

• Eskiden sigara içerdim. - I used to smoke. (a discontinued habit)
• Her yaz köye giderdik. - We used to go to the village every summer. (a repeated custom)
• Babam akşamları gazete okurdu. - My father used to read the newspaper in the evenings. (a routine, now over)

This is distinct from the simple past -di (one specific completed event) and from the past continuous -iyordu (one action in progress at a single moment) - both covered in their own lessons. The past habitual is specifically for “this kept happening, as a rule, back then.”

Forming it

Turkish builds this tense in two layers. The first layer is the aorist, the suffix that already means a general or habitual action in the present (gelir - “comes,” as a general fact). The second layer is the past-tense copula -di, which attaches directly after it and tells you the habit belongs to the past.

The aorist itself has two shapes depending on the stem. For a stem ending in a vowel, it’s simply -r. For a stem ending in a consonant, most multisyllabic verbs take -ır/-ir/-ur/-ür (four-way vowel harmony), while most monosyllabic consonant-final stems take the two-way -ar/-er instead:

A small, fixed set of monosyllabic verbs breaks the pattern above and takes -ır/-ir/-ur/-ür even though they’re one syllable - among the most common are gelmek (to come) → gelir, vermek (to give) → verir, görmek (to see) → görür, bilmek (to know) → bilir, almak (to take) → alır, bulmak (to find) → bulur, olmak (to be/become) → olur, and kalmak (to stay) → kalır. These are worth memorizing as a short list rather than deriving from a rule, since the rule itself has no reliable way to predict which monosyllabic stems join it.

Once the aorist form is settled, the past copula attaches with ordinary four-way harmony based on the aorist suffix’s own vowel, and the personal endings follow exactly as they do in the simple past:

Note the third-person plural: the plural marker -ler/-lar goes on the aorist suffix first, and the past copula follows it - gelirlerdi, not gelirdiler (though the latter also occurs in casual speech with a slightly different feel).

Exceptions worth knowing

The negative form doesn’t just add a negative marker to the regular aorist - it uses a separate, irregular negative aorist stem, -mez/-maz. Gelmek negates to gelmez (“doesn’t come,” not the “expected” gelmiyor-style form), and the past habitual negative is built on top of that: gelmezdi (“he/she didn’t use to come” / “wouldn’t come”). This -mez/-maz stem only has two vowel-harmony shapes (front -mez, back -maz), unlike the four-way affirmative aorist, so okumazdı (“he/she didn’t use to read”) and gelmezdi both use the same two-way split.

Questions place the question particle after the fully conjugated verb, and the particle itself carries the past copula and personal ending instead of the verb. Sen her gün koşar mıydın? (“Did you used to run every day?”) splits the aorist koşar from the question word mıydın (mı + idi + -n), which is where the past tense and the person marker actually land in a question.

The past habitual and the simple past -di can both translate as a plain English past tense, but they’re not interchangeable. Dün okula gittim (“I went to school yesterday”) reports one specific completed event with -di; Eskiden okula yürüyerek giderdim (“I used to walk to school”) reports a repeated past routine with -erdi. Reaching for -di to describe an old habit, or -erdi to report a single one-time event, both sound off to a native ear even though the English translation might look identical.

Examples

• Ben küçükken her gece masal dinlerdim. - When I was little, I used to listen to a bedtime story every night.
• Sen eskiden erken kalkardın, değil mi? - You used to get up early, didn’t you?
• O bize sık sık mektup yazardı. - He/she used to write to us often.
• Biz çocukken bu parkta oynardık. - We used to play in this park as children.
• Siz o restorana gider miydiniz? - Did you (all) use to go to that restaurant? (question)
• Onlar bu şarkıyı hiç dinlemezdi. - They never used to listen to this song. (negative)

Each sentence places a repeated past behavior rather than a single event - and the last two show the question and negative forms keeping the irregular -mez/-maz and the split question particle in place.

Try it yourself

Babi, Speafy’s AI tutor, will have you describe an old daily routine of yours entirely in the past habitual, then swap it into the negative and question forms so the irregular -mez/-maz stem stops needing a double-check, and Speafy’s FSRS-based flashcards keep the short list of monosyllabic -ır/-ir exceptions like gelir and verir in rotation until they feel automatic.