Simple Past in Turkish: -di, -dı, -du, -dü (and -ti, -tı, -tu, -tü)

English marks the past with one word, usually “-ed”: “walked,” “watched,” “wanted.” Turkish does the same job with a single suffix too — but that suffix has to agree with the verb stem on two separate things at once before it can attach.

What this tense does

The -di past describes an action the speaker is certain happened — something they witnessed, were told as settled fact, or otherwise know for sure took place. It’s the tense you reach for to narrate completed events, tell someone what you did yesterday, or report something that definitely occurred:

• Dün okula gittim. — I went to school yesterday.
• Bu filmi gördün mü? — Did you see this movie?
• Ali kitabı okudu. — Ali read the book.

This is different from Turkish’s other past tense, the reported/evidential -miş (covered in its own lesson), which signals the speaker didn’t witness the event firsthand — -di is specifically for what you know happened, not what you heard happened.

Forming it

The suffix has two layers of agreement to track. First, standard four-way vowel harmony picks -dı, -di, -du, or -dü based on the stem’s last vowel:

Second, if the stem’s very last sound is one of the voiceless consonants — f, s, t, k, ç, ş, h, p — the suffix’s d devoices to t as well: bak- (look) ends in the voiceless k, so it takes -tı to give baktı, never the voiced-d form bakdı. A stem ending in a vowel or any other (voiced) consonant keeps the plain d form.

Once the right form of the suffix is chosen, the personal endings attach directly after it:

Note the third person takes no personal ending at all — the bare past-tense suffix itself, gördü, already means “he/she/it saw.”

Exceptions worth knowing

Negation inserts -ma/-me before the past suffix, which can shift which harmony and voicing form follows. Git- (go) negates to git-me- (“not go”), and because -me- ends in the vowel e, the past suffix that follows is -di: gitmedim (“I did not go”). Compare the affirmative gittim (“I went”), where git- itself (ending in the voiceless t) takes -ti directly. The negative marker effectively resets which vowel the past suffix has to harmonize with.

Questions place mı/mi/mu/mü as a separate word after the fully conjugated verb, and the personal ending can move onto the question particle instead of staying on the verb. Geldin mi? (“Did you come?”) keeps the person marker on the verb itself; but in the third person, where the verb carries no ending anyway, the question particle simply follows bare: Geldi mi? (“Did he/she come?”).

The past tense itself is regular even for verbs that look irregular elsewhere. Gitmek (“to go”) famously shifts its stem to gid- before a vowel-initial suffix, giving the present continuous gidiyorum (“I am going”) rather than the “expected” gitiyorum. But -ti is consonant-initial, so no such shift happens in the past tense: the stem stays git-, and adding -ti simply doubles the t to give gitti (“he/she went”), gittim (“I went”). Don’t let the present-continuous irregularity make you second-guess an otherwise perfectly regular past tense.

Examples

• Ben dün akşam erken yattım. — I went to bed early last night.
• Sen bu kitabı ne zaman okudun? — When did you read this book?
• O bize hiç yazmadı. — He/she never wrote to us. (negative)
• Biz geçen yıl İzmir’e taşındık. — We moved to İzmir last year.
• Siz toplantıya geldiniz mi? — Did you (all) come to the meeting? (question)
• Onlar erken kalktılar. — They got up early.

Each sentence shows the same two-layer agreement at work — vowel harmony choosing -dı/-di/-du/-dü or -tı/-ti/-tu/-tü, and the personal ending slotting on afterward to mark who did it.

Try it yourself

Babi, Speafy’s AI tutor, will have you conjugate the same verb across all six persons and flip it between affirmative, negative, and question form until the -di/-ti voicing choice stops needing a conscious check, and Speafy’s FSRS-based flashcards keep the irregular stems like git- reviewed often enough that they don’t quietly drift back toward the “regular” shape you’d otherwise expect.