In my opinion, you should start with the basic grammar. Without knowledge of the suffixes you won´t be able even to use a dictionary. A nice way to do it is to go through the Classes in this site. Another small and sympathetic site is TotallyTurkish which in addition answers to your basic needs of expressing yourself, like greetings, numbers etc. As your hunger grows (as it certainly will) you can search pages like turkishlanguage.co.uk. One thing leads to another.

Good luck for your studies. See you in the site, geaninaiosub.

It´s the impotential (´not being able to´ form of bitirmek ´to stop´, present continuous, sg. 1st

         bit|ir|em|iyor|um

The ingredients are from left to right 1. verb stem 2. causative suffix 3. negative potential 4. present continuous and 5. personal ending sg 1st.

Sorry. The meaning is ´I am not being able to stop´

Thanks. It seems that most relative clauses are translated into Turkish using participles and personal participles plus sentence elements which are changed into adjective attributes. In these examples only infinitives are brought into use.

Interestingly, as your post shows, this question seems to be a backdoor entrance into understanding some features on the use on Persian ki.

How do you express in Turkish the equivalents of those English relative clauses where the relative pronoun refers to the whole prededing sentence, like

         They boy had done his homework this time which was a surprise for the teacher.

         He never called again which made me sad ?

TRT channels are a good substitute for those who cannot physically be in Turkey or don´t have native informants around. When I first opened Turkish news it sounded like a language I had never heard of even though I had been studying on paper for some while. But as you make it a habit you soon recognize words and small sentences. (In my opinion, what is the most important thing in studying a language is doing it every day even if one doesn´t always have so much time.)

Some programs, of course, are more suitable for learners than others. Actually I was hoping other learners would tell about their experiences here but here are some things that I noticed:

*It´s good to choose things which you are really interested in. Studying must be fun.

*The best programs for learners are those where picture or text supports the spoken language. Fortunately this point has been taken seriously even in many news and current topic programs in TRT. My favourite is this morning program where they analyse world newspapers: the headlines help you (if they are not in Japanese) and you can catch things when you concentrate. What helps listening the news in Turkish is looking at world events first in your own language or any language you are fluent in: it takes you half way when you already know what to expect.

*I love weather forecasts in any language. You can just lean back in your chair and enjoy the beautiful flow of language.

*Watching sports sounds difficult at first because the broadcasts are often noisy and the commentators speak impulsively. But if you are into football or tennis or athletics it´s worth trying because within one field of sports vocabulary is quite limited, I guess.

*Excellent programs for language learning are those where practical skills are taught. I have been looking for a nice cooking program but I didn´t find one until now. In kitchen shows the voice is often scratchy, I don´t know why.

*Soap operas and serials often have simple language if you manage to find one that matches your idea of quality. (I can´t watch comedies for a minute, for instance.)

Thanks, si++, this was interesting. What a good grammar day.

The inferential -miş borrows its personal endings from the verb ´to be´ as well.

Every learner should look at this message of yours carefully, si++.

I never noticed that the present tense marker is almost the same in Swedish and Turkish before you mentioned it. (There must be a different box in the brain for every language.)

Swedish gets along perfectly well with one present tense form just like Finnish which has a big Swedish influence even in its grammatical structure. The Swedish have three or four future tenses though, we have none. I sometimes notice that foreigners who try to learn Finnish try to create some kind of present continuous or future forms and it´s possible with some tricks with infinitives and participles but it sounds artificial.

Lewis says that Turkish aorist is noun based, and that´s why he gives a nice explanation for it´s meaning: ´I am a doer´ or ´I am this kind of person who does´. I thought for learners like me who can´t easily understand the continuous tenses maybe another way of approaching the question is to try to understand the limitations of aorist tense: it is not tied to a certain situation or state of world or even state of mind.

What about fazla?