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Turkish has no definite article. Kitap is "book", "the book" and, often, "books"; nothing in front of it changes. What English does with the and a, Turkish does with three other tools: the word bir, a case ending on the object, and word order.

Bir: "a", and also "one"

Bir is the number one, and it doubles as an indefinite article:

Turkish	gloss
bir kitap	a book / one book
bir gün	one day, some day
güzel bir ev	a beautiful house (adjective, then bir, then noun)
bir güzel ev	ONE beautiful house, or "a really beautiful house" (emphatic)

Notice the position in güzel bir ev: the adjective comes first and bir sits right against the noun. That order is the everyday one; putting bir first stresses the number.

Definiteness lives on the object

The real "the" of Turkish is the accusative ending -(y)ı / -(y)i / -(y)u / -(y)ü on a direct object. A bare object is non-specific; a marked object is a particular one:

Turkish	gloss
Kitap okuyorum.	I'm reading (a book / books) — doing some book-reading
Bir kitap okuyorum.	I'm reading a book.
Kitabı okuyorum.	I'm reading the book.
Bir kitabı okuyorum.	I'm reading a (certain, particular) book.
Çay içer misin?	Do you drink tea? / Will you have some tea?
Çayı içtin mi?	Did you drink the tea (I made you)?

The vowel of the ending follows the four-way vowel harmony (see Plurals); a y slips in after a vowel (araba → arabayı, kapı → kapıyı); and p ç t k at the end of many nouns soften before it: kitap → kitabı, ağaç → ağacı, köpek → köpeği, renk → rengi.

The accusative only exists for direct objects. Proper names and pronouns, being definite by nature, always take it when they are objects: Ali'yi gördüm "I saw Ali", onu seviyorum "I love him / her / it".

For subjects: word order

A subject has no ending to carry definiteness, so position does the job. New information tends to come late, near the verb; known information comes first:

Kapıda bir adam var. — "There's a man at the door." (new) Adam kapıda bekliyor. — "The man is waiting at the door." (known)

This, that, that over there

Turkish	gloss
bu kitap	this book (near me)
şu kitap	that book (there, the one I'm pointing at)
o kitap	that book (further off, or the one we mentioned)

O is also the third-person pronoun, "he / she / it" (see Pronouns), which is why o kitap so often means "the book we were talking about".

Generic statements

General truths use the bare noun, singular or plural:

Kedi süt sever. / Kediler süt sever. — "Cats like milk."

Against Hindi, Korean and Japanese

Hindi marks the same thing the same way: no "the", ek "one" for "a", and the postposition को ko on a specific direct object — kitāb paṛho "read a book" against kitāb ko paṛho "read the book" is the kitap / kitabı contrast. Korean 을/를 and Japanese を mark every direct object, specific or not, so they do not carry this meaning; their article work is done by the topic particles 은/는 and は.

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