Verbs

  » Introduction
  » Present tense
  » Negative present tense
  » Past tense
  » Negative past tense


Introduction

It's very important to be familiar with verb conjugations in Japanese because they carry many functions. Time aspects, politeness and negations are some functions built into the different conjugations.

Verbs in Japanese are categorized into two groups, ru-verbs and u-verbs. Other names of the two groups are vowel verbs (ru-verbs) and consonant verbs. Other than these two groups there are also a few irregular verbs, some of them are mentioned in the examples below. They are both conjugated in different ways. Ru-verbs all end with る but this doesn't mean the opposite, that u-verbs don't end with る. An example of this is かえる (to return) which is an u-verb.

Present tense

There are two tenses in Japanese, the present and past tense. Future is expressed through present tense. As said earlier politeness is built into the conjugation, so there are two different conjugations for present tense, one for casual and one for polite use (also known as -masu form). The casual form is the one found in the dictionary. It's recommended to use polite form if you don't know what you should use in a situation and if it's the first time you meet someone.

The dictionary form is the same as the casual present tense conjugation. Ru-verbs are conjugated by replacing the -ru with -masu ending to make it polite. It's a bit more complicated with u-verb where the last syllable is changed to an syllable ending with -i and adding -masu to make it formal.

Negative present tense

Negations are built into the verb conjugations, and as in positive statements there are two different ways of saying the verb depending on how formal you need to be. Casual negations have -nai added, formal ones have -masen. Recognize the similarity with the present tense polite conjugation -masu.

Past tense

Past tense is more complicated than present tense for casual form of u-verbs. Depending on the ending they have different conjugations. For the polite form it follows the same principle as ru-verbs.

Negative past tense

Negations in past tense follow the same logic as negations in present tense. The only difference are the endings, instead of -nai for casual forms -nakatta is used instead. For polite forms -masen is replaced with -masendeshita instead.

Grammar

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