A1 · Nouns · about 7 minutes
No article, no gender
the noun without an article
A Turkish noun has no gender and no word for “the”; “bir” means “a”.
Do you know this already?
“New to me”: the explanation first, then practice. “Test myself”: 3 short questions – get at least two right and you go straight to the harder exercises.
Words you will need2
They appear in this topic’s examples and exercises and are new at this point on the learning path.
- odaroom
- eczanechemist’s, pharmacy
Missing a word? Look it up in the dictionary
Understand
RememberNo article, no gender — and “a” comes right before the noun: büyük bir ev.
- Signal words
- bir
- o
- bu
The form
The patterns at a glance
Each row first says when or what the pattern is used for, then gives an example in Turkish.
| house, the house | ev |
| a house | bir ev |
| a big house | büyük bir ev |
| the book is new | kitap yeni |
| he, she, it | o |
| Ali is a doctor | Ali doktor |
The rules one by one
The form this topic is about
A noun has no gender; any adjective goes with any noun.
Ev büyük, oda küçük.The house is big, the room is small.
There is no definite article.
Kitap masada.The book is on the table.
“A” is bir and comes right before the noun.
Burada bir eczane var.There is a chemist’s here.
With an adjective, bir stands between adjective and noun.
İzmir güzel bir şehir.İzmir is a beautiful city.
With a job, bir is usually left out.
Elif doktor.Elif is a doctor.
Example sentences
Çay sıcak.The tea is hot.
Masada bir kitap var.There is a book on the table.
Mehmet öğretmen.Mehmet is a teacher.
6 more example sentences
Ankara büyük bir şehir.Ankara is a big city.
Kedi bahçede.The cat is in the garden.
Bir çay, lütfen!A tea, please!
Otobüs geç kaldı.The bus is late.
Burada bir park var.There is a park here.
Can iyi bir arkadaş.Can is a good friend.
The trap English speakers fall into
Watch out
English speakers put bir at the start, like English “a”: “a big house” — first “a”, then the adjective. In Turkish bir comes right before the noun, with the adjective in front of it: büyük bir ev, literally “big a house”. The other order sounds awkward.
Quick check
A warm-up: 2 questions, answered straight away. They do not count towards your progress.
Practise
One lesson, one clear goal: you pass with 80% right on the first try. Your answers are checked in the browser; none of them leaves your device.
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Your progress
What your lesson on this topic shows:
The lesson decides this, not a button: passed at 80% on the first try, mastered when you pass it again on another day.
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The full explanation
Read it all · about 1 min
English has already spared you grammatical gender — but Turkish goes further. masa is the table, lamba the lamp, ev the house, and none of them is masculine or feminine. Even the pronoun o means “he”, “she” and “it” at once.
There is no definite article. Kitap masada. means “The book is on the table.” Which book is meant is shown by the context — and, as soon as the noun is an object, by the accusative ending. You will learn that in the section on cases.
For “a” or “an” Turkish uses bir, the same word as the number one. It comes right before the noun, so after an adjective: bir ev “a house”, but büyük bir ev “a big house”. With a job it is usually left out, unlike English: Ali doktor. “Ali is a doctor.”
A closer look
How you can still tell “the” from “a”
Without an article, Turkish works with word order. New information comes late, just before the verb: Masada bir kitap var. “There is a book on the table.” Known information comes first: Kitap masada. “The book is on the table.”
With an object the accusative ending comes in: kitap okuyorummeans “I am reading (some) book”kitabı okuyorum“I am reading the book” What “the” does in English, an ending does here.
Masada bir kitap var. Kitap çok eski.There is a book on the table. The book is very old.
Worth knowing2
Worth knowing
One word for he, she and it
Because nouns have no gender, the pronoun needs none either: o stands for Mehmet, for Ayşe and for the car. Who is meant is clear from the context.
O bugün evde.She is at home today.
Worth knowing
Jobs without a female form
Like English “teacher” or “doctor”, öğretmen and doktor are used for women and men alike. Turkish has no ending for women.
Ayşe öğretmen, Mehmet de öğretmen.Ayşe is a teacher, and Mehmet is a teacher too.