hiçbiri

In short

Why it looks that way

Also with negation on the verb. hiç kimse is "nobody at all", with no reference to a group.

A word with a story stays in memory longer than one learned as a “spelling — translation” pair: memory holds on to meaning, not to a string.

In a live sentence

A single word almost never appears alone in conversation. A sentence shows where it fits and what stands next to it.

• ▶
  Hiçbiri Rusça bilmiyor

  None of them know Russian

Nearby words: pronouns

I, you, we, they. There is a handful of them, they turn up in every sentence, and politeness rides on them: most of these languages keep a formal “you” apart from a familiar one, and choosing the wrong one is noticed faster than a mispronounced word.

• ▶
  ben

  I

  Usually dropped in speech: the verb ending already announces who is acting, like a built-in subject pronoun.
• ▶
  sen

  you (informal)

  Turks switch to first names and sen fast — with peers, in shops, with kids. The predicate next to sen grows a tail -sin/-sın/-sun/-sün by vowel harmony: nasılsın, geliyorsun (in the past it is just -n: geldin).
• ▶
  siz

  you (formal or plural)

  Both the polite "you" to one person and "you" for a group; the verb ending is the same (-sınız), so only context tells which.
• ▶
  o

  he

  Turkish has no grammatical gender at all: one little 'o' covers he, she and it. The same word doubles as 'that' when pointing at things.
• ▶
  biz

  we

  The verb next to biz ends in -iz/-ız/-uz/-üz: geliyoruz, biliriz (in the past it ends in -k: geldik). The pronoun itself is usually dropped — the ending has already said it all.
• ▶
  onlar

  they

  "o" plus "-lar", the plural ending. The same tail is in kitaplar — "books".
• ▶
  benim

  my

  Rarely stands alone: the noun must take its own tail — benim evim, literally "my house-my". Possession agreed twice.
• ▶
  senin

  your (informal)

  The partner of benim and works the same way: senin adın — "your name-your". The tail on the noun is not optional.
• ▶
  bizim

  our

  The noun tail is -imiz: bizim evimiz. It is longer than the others and the one people drop most often.
• ▶
  sizin

  your (formal or plural)

  Also the polite "your". Just like English, Turkish does not separate "your" of a group from a polite "your" to one person.

Test yourself

Five questions from the same set — “pronouns”. Recalling a spelling from meaning is harder than knowing a familiar word on sight, and therefore more useful.

How not to forget this word

Reading a word and remembering it are different jobs. A day later, little survives of a single reading — and that is not bad memory, that is how memory works.

• This has been tested on foreign words too. The difference shows up most when you test yourself a few days later rather than straight away.checked many times
  Kim & Webb, 2022, Language Learning 72(2) · 48 experiments, 3,411 participants, 98 comparisons.
• Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many times
  Adesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
• An answer you worked out yourself sticks better than one handed to you.checked many times
  Bertsch et al., 2007, Memory & Cognition 35(2) · 86 studies, 445 comparisons, d = 0.40.

Next

• Pronouns26 words on the topic
• hiçbir şey — nothingpronoun
• hızlı — quickadjective
• yavaş — slowadjective
• zor — difficultadjective
• All Turkish wordsIndex by topic
• Why a word list doesn't sticka note