Recently I’ve begun noticing how important it is to know how to conjugate
Japanese verbs. For instance, even though I may know the verb 食べる (to eat),
I didn’t know how I would change that if I wanted to say something like,
“I ate” or “I will eat” or “I did not eat” or even “I want to eat.” I began
trying to look up some rules and wow was it difficult to find beginner friendly
places! Below I’ll talk about the three groups of verbs I learned about and
what places I found useful or not.
Reminder that I’m learning Japanese so don’t inherently trust anything below!
The different verb groups
From what I’ve seen, there are three groups for Japanese verbs. They each have a few different names depending on the place that’s describing them. Let’s go through each of them.
Note that I found the Kanji Link website to be the easiest way to understand these groups. Their videos were short, too the point, and beginner friendly. Much of the information below will be me summarizing that into words.
They also have a Verb Chart that summarizes this very well, too!
Irregular verbs / Group 3 verbs
Even though this group is referred to as the “irregular” group - it actually is the easiest in my mind. That’s because there’s only 2 verbs in all of Japanese that fall into this group.
Those verbs are する (to do) and 来る (to come). Depending on the tense,
there are special cases you just have to memorize for these.
For instance, the present polite form of する is します and the present polite
form of 来る (くる) is 来ます (きます).
In another post, I’ll talk about the different types of tenses there are and how to make them (such as polite, past, negative, etc). Just gotta learn that first haha.
Ichi-dan verbs / Group 2 verbs / る (ru) verbs / iru or eru verbs
This group has a lot of names in part because of the difficulty of recognizing verbs that belong in this group vs. the last remaining group.
One of the most common ways of denoting this group is by calling it ru verbs.
However, a verb ending in ru could belong to all three groups - so some
people refer to this group as iru / eru verbs instead. That’s because all verbs
that end in aru, uru or oru don’t belong in this group. Also, most verbs
that end in iru or eru do belong in this group.
Unfortunately, that most part is a bit tricky since there’s no rule that I’m
aware of that can be easily used to categorize verbs that end in iru or eru.
Most places just say to memorize these, or read enough to be aware of them, or
look them up in the dictionary. Some of the special verbs that I’ve learned that
end in iru or eru that don’t belong in this group are いる (to need),
入る (to enter), and 走る (to run).
With all that being said, this group of verbs is nice in the sense that conjugating them is pretty easy.
For instance, to make the present polite form of a verb in this group, you just
drop the る at the end of the verb and replace it with ます.
For instance, the word 食べる (to eat) would become 食べます. Not too bad,
right?
Go-dan verbs / Group 1 verbs / う (u) verbs
If a verb does not fall into one of the two categories above, then it falls into
this category. The reason this is called u verbs sometimes is because all Japanese
verbs that are in the present / plain form end with an う sound.
This makes many verbs really easy to categorize - as if they end in an う sound and
don’t end with る - then they are in this group.
The problem becomes if a verb ends with a る - and the rule is the same thing
mentioned in the previous section. If the verb ends with aru, uru, or oru,
then it belongs in this group. If the verb ends with iru or eru - then it’s
most likely not in this group - but there are a few notable exceptions.
The conjugation for this group depends on the tense - but the present polite tense isn’t too bad to conjugate if you know Hiragana. Let’s take a look at the Hiragana Chart that Kanji Link uses (which is shortened to only include the columns that verbs can end in):
To conjugate verbs in this group as polite + present, you simply find the character the verb ends in and change that to be the character from the previous row.
So if a verb ends in む - then conjugating it would change that to み. Likewise,
す would become し and so on.
Let’s pick a real example - the verb 消す (to turn off / to erase). It ends in
す so we would change that to し and the verb would become 消し + something.
The polite present form would be, 消します.
(Please remember that conjugating these verbs in other tenses is not necessarily the same)
Other places I tried that I didn’t find useful
There were a variety of sites and videos I watched to try and understand the verb groups. Other than the Kanji Link one I mentioned above, I didn’t find any of these particularly useful. That being said, I think it’s worth calling out the places I went to and why I didn’t like them. It’s possible that other people may find these useful as everyone learns different!
- Tae Kim
- I found the English on this page to be difficult to parse and the lack of visuals a bit of a challenge to wrap my head around.
- Imambi
- Went way too far with verbs and categorizing them. Might be useful for people that are super into grammar - but, as it stands, I don’t want to read about “Transitive” vs. “Auxilary” verbs. This just feels too complex for a beginner.
- Wasabi
- While this looks pretty - it’s missing a lot of key points around conjugation and it doesn’t do a great job of helping you figure out which verb belongs in which group.
- Japanese Ammo With Misa
- I found this video to be too drawn out. The core conjugation / groups can be summarized in such a short period of time - yet this video is 30+ minutes long!
- Wikipedia Commons
- WAY too much information here - with no clear explanations. Probably useful if you are already familiar with the concepts and just want to have a cheat sheet to look up things with.
Concluding Thoughts
Finding a place that made this click for me was hard - but I’m glad I persevered and kept looking around for something that fit me. Hopefully this post helped you or will help guide you to something that works for you!
If you already knew about the verb groups - where did you learn about them from? Any recommendations for others?
Thanks for reading ^.^