I completely understand the concept of moving in the hiragana chart for them in the present tense, but when it comes to other forms like the て form, passive form, conditional form, etc., I can read the rules about what to substitute but it feels like with each form there’s a super specific set of rules depending on the hiragana I’m substituting. Do I have to memorize the rules for every single variation for other form conjugation with seemingly no pattern or reason, or is there some sort of trick to it like going up and down on the hiragana chart for the present/past tense form? Any help or trick to help memorize these rules are very much appreciated, because memorizing these specific rules for every variation and conjugating these naturally while speaking seems daunting.
Ichidan and irregular verbs thankfully are pretty simple to understand for me in all variations, it’s just the amount of rules for godan verbs are hard to grasp for me.
5 comments
As the word godan (五段) suggests, there are five subtypes in this category. For て forms, we have:
1. く => いて
2. ぐ => いで
3. す => して
4. ぬ、ぶ、む => んで
5. う、つ、る => って
Those do have to be memorized. But then that’s it. You can kind of collapse #s 1 and 2 into one thing (unvoiced and voiced versions), and you can see that #4 is mostly pretty nasal. Basically, in each case you can see it as the result of combining the い-row kana of the dictionary form’s last syllable with て, but certain changes usually result because of saying it fast (e.g. みて becomes んで).
て form is kind of a memorization thing, but it won’t take too long, this has a chart and you just memorize it https://www.tofugu.com/japanese-grammar/te-form/
past tense is like almost free once you learned て it’s just the same but with た, so you got 2 for 1
ます form is pretty easy you just turn everything to the い sound so like く becomes き, ぐ becomes ぎ, う becomes い, す becomes し, and so on
it’ll get easier
I’ve only just started studying the て form and I was originally super overwhelmed at the number of endings, but they are fairly logical when you look at them. If you haven’t studied linguistic sound traits like nasal, lablial, voiced/voiceless, my BA is in linguistics and that knowledge is helping a LOT. the nasal/labial sounds add the nasal ん (which then makes the voiceless て become で), くand ぐ are the same except for the same voiced/voiceless distinction. Noticing those patterns, and then just a lot of practice conjugating them and I was able to memorize them a lot quicker than I expected.
To the tune of [Country Road](https://youtu.be/Cj-P-nEPoe0)
godan verbs just shift the final letter to another one in the same row of the gojuuon and then add more stuff…. instead of taking the る off and adding stuff…. that’s the main difference. yes that means the part you add on for passive for ichidan is られる and for godan is ＊れる where ＊ is the あ row of whatever it was before. e.g. およぐ＝およがれる
here’s all of them in one handy cheat-sheet but really there’s no more to it than ichidan. it’s just a shift and then the rest is the same.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/AMB_Japanese_Verbs.pdf