Japanese is Possible!
Lesson 5
Here come the verbs
q Verb use
q Past tense
q Useful Words
q Study Tips
Using verbs
In the present tense, it's very easy to make simple sentences with Japanese
verbs. Why? Because in plain speech, they require no conjugation. In Japanese,
the predicate verb (the main verb of a sentence), will always be at the end of a
sentence, with the exception of particles that may follow it. Let's look at an
example (from now on, any vocabulary that you don't recognize and that has not
been explained in a previous lesson will be at the bottom of the lesson):
Tanaka san wa mizu o nomu.
[Tanaka tpc water oj drink.]
Tanaka drinks water.
Note: I have used the arbitrary abbreviations tpc to show that wa marks a topic
and oj to show that o marks an object. I will also use sj to show that ga marks a
subject.
Ame ga furu.
[Rain sj precipitate.]
It's raining.
Kore o kau ka.
[This oj buy?]
Will you buy this?
Itsu gohan o taberu?
[When meal oj eat?]
When will you eat?
See? It's pretty simple at this point. You can see that I put "you" in a number of
the translations. The speaker could just have easily been referring anyone else,
depending on the context, but if you ask something like the above and you are
not talking about anybody in particular, the listener will assume that you are
referring to him or her.
Now that you know how to place a verb into a sentence, let's take it up a notch
with:
Conjugation
Conjugation wise, there are three types of Japanese verbs: ichidan verbs, godan
