JAPANESE LESSON ON VERBS... OVERVIEW+ICHIDAN

Ohayou gozaimasu. Today I am going to be focusing on Japanese verbs, which is a little advanced if you don't know any Japanese, but since they tend to be confusing to beginners, I will go ahead and teach you common ones now so that you aren't totally lost when we get more into them. This will be a long post because it's hard to summarize Japanese verb patterns, but Japanese verbs themselves are eaaasy compared to Western languages (french, german, spanish), trust me!

You may have heard that Japanese has only two irregular verbs. That is kind of true. There are a handful of verbs that are irregular, but they have a pattern to their irregularity. The two in question, suru (to do) and kuru (to come) are the only ones so highly irregular that they require effort to memorize. The rest consist of 2 categories, godan and ichidan.

Godan verbs end in anything OTHER THAN -iru or -eru.
This includes verbs such as homasu (to speak), aruku (to walk), tsukuru (to make), and many others.

Ichidan verbs are the verbs that DO end in -iru or -eru. Remember: -iru, -eru, Ichidan.
This includes verbs like oshieru (to teach) and taberu (to eat), among others.
HOWEVER... like any other languages, there are exceptions to the ichidan rule... Some verbs that end in -iru & -eru are actually godan verbs. Ignore this for now, I'll teach you some in a later post.

Examples of conjugation:
Watashi wa pan o tabemasu.
I am eating bread.
This is what is known as the 'present-polite' form. For ichidan verbs, adding -masu in the place of the -iru/-eru will make the verb present-polite. Beginners to Japanese should always learn polite forms first, becasue it's kind of difficult to learn when to use polite and when to use casual.

Watashi wa pan o tabemashita.
I ate bread.
This is 'past-polite' form for an ichidan verb. Simply take off the -iru/-eru and replace it with -mashita.


That's all for now everybody, I'll post godan conjugation later!