sporu : sports
tenis : tennis
golf : golf
basketbol : basketball
masa topu : table tennis (literally, 'table ball')
yüzmeyi : swimming
koşmayı : jogging
yelkenciliği : sailing
yürümeyi : walking
spor seyretmesini : watching sports
If you want to say that you like doing any of these things, you say Ben...severim; e.g., 'I like walking' is Ben yürümeyi severim. If you need sports locations, some examples are:
stadyum : stadium
tenis sahası : tennis court
yüzme havuzu : swimming pool
If you need to ask where something is, you always use nerededir, e.g., Basketbol sahası nerededir?
It's not sports if you don't have interjections! Something about athletic contests requires them. Some common Turkish interjections and exclamations, with loose English approximations:
Aman! : Oh dear!
Maşallah! : Wonderful!
İnşallah! : God willing!
Aferin! : Well done!
Çok güzel! : Very good!
If song and dance are more your thing, 'song' is şarkı and 'dance' is oyun. When people say Susalım!, that means 'Hush!' and Program başliyor means that the show is starting. A belly dancer is a dansöz; 'to dance' is dans etmek.
If you want to take an active verb and make it passive, you do so by adding -il-/-ıl-/-ul-/-ül- to the stem, as vowel harmony requires, unless the stem ends in -l, in which case you use -in-/-n-. Thus sevmek, to love, becomes sevilmek, to be loved; görmek, to see, becomes görülmek, to be seen; almak, to take, becomes alınmak, to be taken; okumak, to read, becomes okunmak, to be read.
Conditional is a particular mood in Turkish that gets an -se- suffix to the stem. So in Ben böyle dans edersem, çok kilo kaybederim, 'If I dance like this, I will lose a lot of weight', the 'dans edersem' starts with the infinite, dans etmek; the -r- indicates an aorist tense, the -se- indicates a conditional, and the -m indicates first person.
If you want to say "Let's....", you do this in Turkish with the interjection Haydi and adding -(y)alim/-(y)elim at the end of the verb:
Haydi, lokantaya gidelim : Let's go to the restaurant.
Haydi, yüzelim : Let's swim
Haydi, bir kayık kiralıyalım : Let's rent a boat.
And that's enough for a taste of Turkish today. We have one more to complete the week, when tomorrow, Pazar, we cover chatting topics: saying what you do, talking about the weather, and so forth.
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Tayfun and Gillian Çağa, Conversational Turkish in 7 Days, Passport Books (Chicago: 1992).
