One of the more interesting things about life is that stuff keeps on happening, rather than just being all the time. In order to speak about all these exciting events going on in the world, we use a variety of verbs. Now, verbs are notoriously tricky beasts, requiring all sorts of arcane conjugation depending on what's doing them and how they're being done. If you've ever tried to learn a second language before, you'll doubtless recall many a happy hour spend memorising verb tables and the like. Japanese, again, proves itself to be a bit different.

The biggest verb ever

English verbs are annoying. For every conjugation rule, there are a hundred exceptions, and you have little choice other than to learn them. Why does hang become hung? And why sometimes hanged? That's not even considering the insane sequences of verbs needed to say that I have been going to evening classes or would have gone if I had the time.

The bad news is that there are loads of verb forms in Japanese. The good news is that they are nice and simple, and that you won't need most of them. The really good news is that there are only two - that's right, two - irregular verbs. The regulars are neatly divided into two camps, meaning you need only ever worry about four different ways of conjugation. With that sigh of relief, we can get started on actually using them.

Structure

Japanese is often referred to as a Subject-Object-Verb language, but it is really a little more subtle than that. The general idea behind it is that the important parts of the sentence come after their details, and so the final bit is the most important of all: the verb. Everything else just adds information to it, such as who did the thing and what they did it to. Consider the following:

とうきょうに　いく。 (Tôkyô ni iku.) - To go to Tokyo.

Here we have the verb "to go" (いく) at the end, preceded by its extra information, "to Tokyo" (とうきょうに). に is another particle, effectively equivalent to the English preposition, "to." As the important bits come after their details, remember, the "to" comes after the location.

Anyway, back to the verb. At the moment, this little phraselet doesn't actually involve anyone doing anything. いく is the form you would find when you look up "go" in a dictionary; In order to make use of it, it needs conjugating.

Group I

One of the collections of regular verbs is known as the Group I, Godan, or -u verbs. いく is one of them. A Group I verb has a stem, which is everything up to the -u sound at the end. Thus, the stem of いく is "ik-". To conjugate it, you simply put a different suffix after the stem. The four with which we shall be concerning ourselves are:

The inclusion of negatives in that table may seem a little odd at first. In English, a sentence is negated by cunning addition of the word "not" or a form of "do not," while in Japanese the same is accomplished by changing the suffix of the verb. There are many other possible suffixes whose meanings require extra words in English, but we shall casually ignore those for now. Another oddity comes in the form of the lack of a future tense. This is much less of a problem than it may initially sound, as context determines whether or not we're talking about the future. For example:

げつようびに　ロンドンに　いきます。 (Getsuyôbi ni London ni ikimasu.) - On Monday, I will go to London.

Note that here, the particle に is used twice, once for "to (location)" and once for "on (time)".

Group II

The other group of regular verbs is known as the Group II, Ichidan, or -ru verbs. These always end in -iru or -eru, although (annoyingly) there are some -iru/-eru verbs in Group I. Conjugating Group II verbs is really easy, as the stem is everything up to the る. So for the verb "to eat," たべる (taberu), the stem is simply たべ. The suffixes are the same as the Group I table, only without the leading -i:

This would be a good time to introduce another particle, を, which is pronounced as just "o." It is used to mark the object of a sentence, which is very handy when you start using verbs such as "to eat."

わたしは　てんぷらを　たべました。 (Watashi wa tempura o tabemashita) - I ate tempura.

Irregulars

Finally, there are the two irregular verbs, する (suru) "to do" and くる (kuru) "to come."

Conclusion

The four forms used here are just a small sample of those available to the budding verb-user, but they are certainly four of the most important. Japanese puts a lot of emphasis on politeness in many aspects of the language, and verb conjugation is no exception. The forms on this page are polite enough to use when communicating with someone you don't know, without being too formal for everyday use.

There is a very useful verb form, known as the -te form, which will be covered in more advanced sections. Otherwise, you can live a long and happy life just using these basic forms and looking up vocab in a dictionary. Go forth and translate, and you'll be surprised how much makes sense now.

かえる。 (kaeru) - to return, to go back

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