Learn the Top 100 Turkish Words: Pronoun Cases, Particles and Olmak

Deck VP0170 promises 100 words but has 98, and they come from a frequency list built on TV subtitles. It is almost all function words: pronouns, particles, var/yok, and forms of olmak. There are no numbers, no food words and no days of the week. That makes it a good first deck, as long as you know one thing: Turkish grammar lives in suffixes, and this deck breaks those suffixes up across separate cards.

Ten cards from the deck

Other words you'll meet: bir, ne, ve, için, çok, ama, evet, hayır, şey, daha, kadar, gibi, tamam, her, neden, nasıl, hiç, sonra, şimdi, önce, biraz, hadi, güzel, yani, lütfen, bile, peki, eğer, artık, gerçekten, belki, doğru, büyük, biri, adam, ile, hiçbir, yardım, sanırım, tüm.

Rebuild the paradigms the deck scattered

Pronouns. Twelve cards are case forms of four words. Learn them as a grid:

Buna isn't in the deck, but the grid shows it is missing.

Vowel harmony. mi / mı (cards 6, 15), misin / musun (49, 54) and de / da (7, 14) are each one word under vowel harmony, not two variants. The question particle has four forms (mi, mı, mu, mü). It is written as a separate word, and its vowel matches the word before it: güzel mi?, doğru mu?. Cards 84 (in) and 94 (ın) are the genitive suffix, which never stands alone. Read them as -in/-ın/-un/-ün (benim, onun).

One verb, six cards. oldu, olur, olacak, olan, olarak, olduğunu are all forms of olmak (to be, to become): past, aorist, future, participle, adverbial, and nominalized. Add olmak to the hint field on each of them.

Three ways to say no

The most useful contrast in the deck is between hayır, yok and değil. Each has its own job:

• hayır: no, as an answer
• yok: there isn't, or I don't have (the opposite of var)
• değil: is not, used to negate a noun or adjective (iyi değil, it's not good)

Make one card with all three, using an example sentence for each.

Cards to fix

• Card 59 İyi (capitalized) repeats card 27. Delete it.
• Card 35 or → ya: on its own, ya means or only in ya… ya… (either… or…). The everyday word is ya da or veya.
• Card 83 Mr. → bay is the formal written form. In speech, Turks put Bey after the first name: Ahmet Bey.

Where to go next

Next, cover the numbers and nouns this deck leaves out with Turkish Vocabulary: 1000 Words and Turkish Travel & Food Vocabulary. The case endings are explained in the Turkish verb system guide. To study this deck, open Flip It and search the library for VP0170 – Turkish Vocabulary: Top 100 Essential Words.