The -di past: what you saw with your own eyes
This is the plain past tense, and it is the one you will use ninety percent of the time: something happened, you know it happened, end of story. Build it by dropping -mek/-mak and adding -di, then the person: -m = I · -n = you · (nothing) = he/she/it · -k = we · -niz = you (plural) · -ler = they The ending has eight shapes — di, dı, du, dü, ti, tı, tu, tü — and both halves of that are predictable. The vowel follows harmony. The d hardens to t after the voiceless consonants of the memory word «FıSTıKÇı ŞaHaP» (f, s, t, k, ç, ş, h, p): git + ti = gitti, çalış + tı = çalıştı. Here is the part that will make you smile. English past tenses are a minefield: go/went, buy/bought, think/thought, teach/taught — two hundred forms that simply have to be learned. Turkish has none of that. Every verb takes -di. The most irregular thing in the whole tense is a d turning into a t, and even that follows a rule. One genuine extra: Turkish also has a second past, -miş, for things you did NOT witness — hearsay, discovery, storytelling. «Gelmiş» = apparently he came. You will meet it in the stories; you do not need it to speak.
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