I wanted to ask if conjugation is a thing. Sorry if this sounds dumb. It’s been a week since I decided to learn Japanese. I’m not even sure if conjugation is the correct term for it. For instance:
In spanish, the verb: To have
My/I: Tengo
Tú: Tienes
He/She/They: Tienes
and so on.
Is that a thing in Japanese? Also please list any beginner friendly grammar tools that helped you!
8 comments
Yes and this really should be covered by every possible learning resource available
Please pick up genki 1 or Tae Kim or something
Yes definitely and it will be covered by any resource you use for grammar.
I’m a little past N5 and haven’t seen a verb that changes based on volume of nouns it affects.
Japanese doesn’t have the same type of conjugations Spanish has.
[This image explains it pretty well.](https://imgur.com/oazSYuI)
I do believe saying Japanese has “conjugations” might not be the right way to go about it, as it could lead to misconceptions henceforth and misunderstandings of how Japanese grammar works. If you want some clarifications about the fundamental structures of Japanese and how they differ from most European standpoints, I’d recommend watching Cure Dolly’s course’s first few videos.
So, yes, it could be considered as “conjugations”, but not in a European way (aka, verbs endings mutate and do weird stuff). But in essence, you’re just using verbs and their “infinitive forms” and attaching helper-verbs that modify their meanings; these helper-verbs can thus, in turn, be modified with other helper-verbs, etc (as Japanese is an agglutinative language).
But don’t quote me on that.
lil tip: go to jisho.org, look up a word
hit “show inflections”
guess what it shows you all the conjugations!
[This](https://youtu.be/qcOhHmU0znI) Cure Dolly video has some explanation. Some people call it “conjugation” because the function is similar, but in Japanese you actually attach helper verbs instead.
Also there’s no change based on the subject (1st/2nd/3rd person singular/plural) like you’re asking about.
Yes Japanese do “conjugate” verbs in a sense. The technical term is inflection as it applies to other word classes as well. But typically conjugating is the same as infecting verbs (conversely, the inflection of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, etc. is called declination).
If you’re used to Spanish (or most western conjugations) you know we typically conjugate verbs to contextualise them in time, and in some cases (like Spanish) to match the Subject of the verb.
In Japanese, verbs and adjectives inflect depending on mood, voice, politeness, as well as time. This makes verbs very powerful in Japanese. So much so that a verb alone is enough to form a complete sentence.
One might imagine that this means that there are infinitely many conjugations to Japanese verbs. And if you Google “Japanese conjugations” you will probably stumple upon [this image](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation#/media/File%3AAMB_Japanese_Verbs.pdf), confirming those fears.
Not to worry though, it’s not as bad as it looks. Firstly, Japanese conjugations are extremely regular. In modern, regular Japanese, there’s basicly only 2 truly irregular words (来る and する), and I can only think of 1 verb that is regular with a minor exception (行く). Secondly, there is really only 5 inflections you need to learn, the rest is attained by adding on auxilary verbs/adjectives to these inflections.
Most resources will approach these concepts pretty early on.
Japanese doesn’t have conjugations. It’s the same word for all subjects!! It saves a lot of headache compared to Spanish when it comes to this