Are there any tools or resources for learning to recognize the meaning of verbs that have been conjugated, especially multiple times/with multiple grammatical patterns?
I’m talking stuff like the potential form + て form + すぎる + passive or すぎる + にくい/安い + desire form.
3 comments
I liked the app ‘Imiwa’ when I was a beginner-intermediate student. It’s a dictionary app but it has a lot of the main conjugations included for reference
one trick with jisho is that you can click “show inflections” after looking up a word and it’ll show you all these different conjugations
however for multiple conjugations happening at the same time, IDK a good tool
Read manga.
It’s a bit of a fool’s errand to try to drill the combinations like multiplication tables because
– there are far too many combinations
– looking at something and taking a moment to think “ah, yes, the continuous causative with a mildly formal imperative form of ‘to grant a boon’ ” – that isn’t terribly useful
This is likely your end goal: to see or hear 泊まっていさせてくれ！ and *think* 泊まっていさせてくれ！ with a strong gut sense of when you might say that, what it would feel like to be in that situation, etc. etc. There are several building blocks there, but if build your gut sense for each of them individually, your brain will do a pretty good job of putting them together.
(Human languages fit the patterns of human brains. Trust yourself.)
The alternative of “well, first I identify the parts, then I remember what each of those grammatical signals mean, then I figure out how they fit together” can be helpful for passing tests, but it’s far too slow and awkward for real use.
Feed yourself Japanese patterns in the context of stories and it will come together naturally. Manga is especially good because you can see what’s happening and you can slow down and look at the words
(p.s. this is a contrived example; I’m not sure it’s normal to say 泊まっていさせる and I can’t find real examples of it in the corpus-search tools I usually use. There’s a good chance that I haven’t heard exactly that combination – like I said, there are far too many to practice. But I do have a good sense of what it could mean if I *did* encounter it.)