For example, would you rather your textbook/website explain a construction like たい as:
-masu stem + たい、たかった、たくない、たくなかった
Or as:
連用形 + たい, a 助動詞 which conjugates into:
– たかっ (連用形) + た (past tense 助動詞)
– たく (連用形) + ない (negative 助動詞)
– たく + なかっ (連用形) + た
5 comments
the second one
Definitely the second one.
I also think too much emphasis is placed on the term ‘masu stem’. I think it obscures the fact that there are 3 other verb stems used for conjugation/agglutination.
The first one. It’s not perfect, and maybe someone could find a better word then “-masu stem”, but the second one would have been absolutely deadly for my motivation if my first textbook had tried to explain basic stuff like -たい this way.
The second one is also tricky if you have to take breaks from your learning because of time contraints and when you come back, you’ve forgotten the names and Kanji of words like 連用形, so you’re forced to re-learn them first before you can even understand the simplest explanations in your textbook.
I learned it as 1st example, but I now feel like 2nd one would’ve been much better in the long run. First is easy to understand and memorise, but 2nd familiarises you with official grammar nomenclature, and this makes you understand more and navigate grammar easier later.
Closer to second one, but ideally, neither. たい should really be presented in the following context:
* Verbs can conjugate to 連用形 form (ichidan verbs by removing る as usual, godan verbs by shifting the final kana to い-row), for various purposes, including for conjunction, verb nominalization, and the attachment of auxiliaries that transform the meaning.
* One of the things that can be done with a verb’s 連用形 form is the attachment of auxiliary nouns, verbs, conjunction markers, or 形容詞/い-adjectives to form new meanings. After the attachment, the full cluster (verb in 連用形 form + auxiliary) turns the same type of part of speech as the auxiliary. E.g. attaching an い-adjective turns the cluster into an い-adjective.
* たい is one of the possibly auxiliaries, and is an い-adjective. Its meaning can be parsed as “[performance of verb’s action]-is-desirable”. E.g. “りんごが食べたい”=”apple performs the action of being eating-desirable”=”It it desirable [for me] to eat an apple”=I want to eat an apple”.
* Since たい auxiliary is an い-adjective, it goes without saying that it conjugates just like any other い-adjective, so there is no need to single out specific forms like たかった、たくない、たくなかった.