Asking "When" in Turkish

Learn how to ask "When?"

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Lesson Transcript

Selam arkadaşlar, ben Zehra. Hi everybody! I’m Zehra.

Welcome to TurkishClass101.com’s “3 dakikada Türkçe”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Turkish.

In the last lesson, we learned how to ask "Where" questions in Turkish.

This time, we are going to ask "When" questions.

Let’s start! Hadi başlayalım!

Imagine you want to ask when your roommate is coming back home. You will ask him Ne zaman eve geliyorsun?

So let’s break down this question.

First we had-

Ne zaman, which is the basic translation of "When" in Turkish.

zaman means “time”, and

ne, as you may remember, means “what”. Although literally ne zaman means “what time” it is also used to mean “when.”

Next, we have, eve which is "to home."

And finally, geri gelmek is the verb "to come back", and geri geliyorsun is the 2nd person present form of this verb.

So, altogether it is Ne zaman eve geri geliyorsun?

"When will you come back home?

So in Turkish, "When" is generally translated as ne zaman. For example, if you want to ask "When were you born?" you will say Ne zaman doğdun?

So let’s have a look at another example.

How can you say "When did you arrive?"

It’s really simple since it’s exactly the same pattern - Ne zaman vardın?

First we have Ne zaman, which is "When"

The second word is vardın which is the verb varmak, meaning “to arrive” in the 2nd person present tense.

If you want to ask a question about duration as in "Since when have you been a teacher?" Then you will have to say Ne zamandır öğretmesin?

If the question “when” has a starting point, and you are asking about the time scale, we have to use ne zamandır instead of ne zaman.

Let’s see how to ask "Until when?" in Turkish. It’s very easy because you can translate it directly. It becomes Ne zamana kadar?

So for example, if you want to ask a friend "Until when are you going to stay here?", it will be Burada ne zamana kadar kalacaksın?

Now it’s time for Zehra’s Insights.

To ask how long an action has been taking place in Turkish, we could say Ne zamandır.

For example -

Ne zamandır bekliyorsun?

That is "How long have you been waiting?"

So in this lesson, we learned how to correctly use the Turkish word for "When", Ne zaman.