Turkish Adverbs

While in English adverbs are usually formed by adding (-ly) to adjectives, in Turkish many adverbs are formed from adjectives, simply by adding the suffix –ce  to the  adjective or using the word “bir şekilde” with the adverb. Examples:

Yavaş  (slow) becomes yavaşça (slowly)

Here you should be careful about the suffix –ce because as you can see the suffix turns to be

 –ça. The reason is quite simple: “e” turns to “a” because of the last vowel similar to the rule about plurals. “c” turns to “ç” because if a word ends with one of the letters “ f,s,t,k,ç,ş,h,p” the  the suffix  –ce transforms to -çe

“Yavaş bir şekilde” can also be used instead of “yavaşça”.

Some words can be used as an adverb without using any suffixes. Look at the example below:

“Eve çok geç geldi” means “He came home too late”.

 Here the adverb is “geç”  which means “late”. It is an adverb of time.

The simplest way to decide the word is whether an adverb or not is to look at the word that follows. If the follower word is a verb than the word is adverb. See the example:

“Jack güzel bir şarkı söyledi”. means Jack sang a good song. In this case the word “güzel” is an adjective because the word “şarkı” that follows is not a verb it is a noun which means “song”.

“Jack şarkıyı güzel söyledi”. means Jack sang well.  In this case the word “güzel” is an adverb because the word ”söyledi” is a verb which means sang.