merhaba..
kafam karisti artik

in this sentence:

*seninle konuþmayý çok istedim ama eve çok geç zamanda
geldim..*

can anybody tell me why u say "konusmayi" and not "konusmak"? I mean, I understand the sentence without any problem, but in my turkish books and also in the sites for learning turkish I've been to it's said that if there's any verb before the verb "istemek" it always goes in the infinitive form.. so: "seninle konusmak çok istedim.." but I've asked a turkish friend about it and she has told me "seninle konusmak.." is wrong, but she cant explain me why lol
well hope somebody will tell me about it.. thnx

>if there's any verb before the verb "istemek" it always >goes in the infinitive form..

This rule is almost correct and most of the time applicable. To make this rule even more corect, I want to make a small addition to it, change it as follows:

"if there's any verb JUST before the verb "istemek" it always goes in the infinitive form.."

However, in the example that you told, this rule(updated one) cannot be applied, since the verb "konusmak" does not come JUST before the verb "istemek", there is an adverb "cok" (= very much) in between. Based on this, we can make another rule based on the previous one:

"if there's a verb before the verb "istemek" and there is an adverb between the verb and "istemek", the verb does not go into infinitive form, instead, it goes into noun form by taking -yi as suffix to its end."

Hope this rule holds, because I just made up.

ps. By the way sorry for the previous posting, I made a mistake. Sevgili admin, can you please remove the previous posting, or give me the right to do that myself, it's my mistake anyway. Thanks...

çok tesekkür ederim Ali.. I understand now (:

hi,
about the infinitive issue: konuşmak/konuşmaya
I think that the best explanation is that if you like talking to this person in general you should say:Seninle konuşmak isterim. But if it's more specified like you wanted to talk to that person only on that occasion, you should say: Seninle konuşmayı istedim.
So the fırst one: Seninle konuşmak istiyorum= I love/lıke talkıng to you.
Seninle konuşmayı istedim = I wanted to talk to you.
I often have these problems where to use mak/mek where ma/me and a declanation suffix.

Selam

Cici,
Although what you said is not totally wrong, it's not correct either and just a specialization of the rule-like statement I wrote above. For this specific example, both "seninle konusmayi istedim" and "seninle konusmak istedim" are correct but in practice the latter is used more frequently. Moreover, if we follow your explanation and use "cok" (=very) as an adverb in the sentence, we could say "seninle konusmak cok isterim" to referring to a general case. However, this sentence is not correct and it should be "seninle konusmayi cok isterim". In short, it is really a matter of the existence of an adverb between "istemek" and the verb preceding it. I suggest you to follow the given rule above, otherwise, your sentences will not be correct with the reasoning you explained int he previous posting. I hope this message does not make things more confusing.

hi,
I'm a little bit confused
Another example with istemek:
a) Bu filmi seyretmek istiyorum
b) Bu filmi syretmeyi istiyorum.

Can the meaning of the second sentence be that I like watching that movie over and over again, let's say it's my favourite?

The thing I wrote about the use of istemek like for general and specific, is what they taught us at University. That's why I was confused by your message

Selam

>Can the meaning of the second sentence be that I like watching
>that movie over and over again, let's say it's my favourite?

Not really! As I said, in terms of meaning, there is no difference between these sentences.

>The thing I wrote about the use of istemek like for general and
>specific, is what they taught us at University.

I see, I mean to make this differentiation would be "overformalization", or a result
of efforts towards putting a language into a a formal structure. I am not a linguist,
but I know in practice nobody makes such a differentiation neither in written or spoken
Turkish. If the instructor at your university is not a native-speaker, that might be
the reason for creating such rules. Anyway, it does not make much difference either way.
However, as I said, if there is an adverb between the verbs, you should definitely use the
verb with -yi suffix and the reasoning involving general/specific differentiation will not
work here. Anyway, I am repeating myself, the more I discuss this, the more confusing it will
become.

Thanks for your replay

From now on I'll stick to the rule with the adverbs and I hope it would be much easier

Selam

omg cici u confused me now
I think wht Ali said is the correct use..