Verb Practice Exercises
Vocabulary used in this section
Here is a list of a few verbs and the accompanying kanji that you will find useful.
I have listed the kanji you will need for the vocabulary for your convenience. The link will take you to a diagram of the stroke order. However, it doesn't clearly show the direction (though you can kind of tell by the animation) so you should check with a kanji dictionary if you're not sure. I recommend practicing the kanji in the context of real words (such as the ones below).
Here is a list of some common verbs you will definitely want to learn at some point.
- する - to do
- しゃべる - to talk; to chat
- 見る【みる】 - to see
- 来る【くる】 - to come
- 行く【いく】 - to go
- 帰る 【かえる】 - to go home
- 食べる 【たべる】 - to eat
- 飲む 【のむ】 - to drink
- 買う 【かう】 - to buy
- 売る 【うる】 - to sell
- 切る 【きる】 - to cut
- 入る 【はいる】 - to enter
- 出る 【でる】 - to come out
- 持つ 【もつ】 - to hold
- 待つ 【まつ】 - to wait
- 書く【かく】 - to write
- 読む 【よむ】 - to read
- 歩く 【あるく】 - to walk
- 走る 【はしる】 - to run
- 遊ぶ 【あそぶ】 - to play
Practice with Verb Classification
There's really not much to do at this point except to practice classifying verbs as either a ru-verb or an u-verb. You can also take this opportunity to learn some useful verbs if you do not know them already. We'll learn how to conjugate these verbs according to their category in the next few sections.
In the chart below, you should mark whether the given verb is either an u-verb or a ru-verb. The first answer is given as an example of what you need to do. Obviously, verbs that do not end in 「る」 are always going to be u-verbs so the tricky part is figuring out the category for verbs that end in 「る」. Remember that verbs that do not end in "eru" or "iru" will always be u-verbs. While most verbs that do end in "eru" or "iru" are ru-verbs, to make things interesting, I've also included a number of u-verbs that also end in eru/iru. Though you do not need to memorize every word in the list by any means, you should at least memorize the basic verbs.
| verb | ru-verb | u-verb | exception verb |
| 行く | ● | ||
| 出る | ● | ||
| する | ● | ||
| 買う | ● | ||
| 売る | ● | ||
| 食べる | ● | ||
| 入る | ● | ||
| 来る | ● | ||
| 飲む | ● | ||
| しゃべる | ● | ||
| 見る | ● | ||
| 切る | ● | ||
| 帰る | ● | ||
| 書く | ● |
'Japanese is by far more
'Japanese is by far more complex when it comes to writing systems. English is more difficult to speak for sure.I think Japanese is one of the hardest languages to gain fluency in writing and reading.'
Japanese rarely use more than 2000 kanji. Japanese is not nearly as hard to learn to read/write as chinese is, which uses ONLY kanji symbols. (No shortcuts by using syllabaries). My wife is chinese and says she knows upwards of 8000 kanji. So you could say that japanese is twice as easy to learn as chinese. And don't even get my started on their crazy tones and pronunciation. I'm trying to learn both, and japanese is a breeze in comparison. So chin up and think, "At least it's not chinese!". :)
Actually, the difficulty in
Actually, the difficulty in writing does not correspond perfectly to the number of characters used.
Japanese is very difficult because often the pronunciation of a character is seemingly random (百足 becomes むかで), especially in place names (栗田 in northern Kyoto is pronounced くんだ rather than くりた). Even among most standard pronunciation of the characters, there are often very many of them so it is difficult to know which is which. It is difficult enough that even native speakers often read things wrong at first, if they are not familiar with whatever the place or word is (even though they're familiar with the kanji and its primary pronunciations, since, as you say, not so many are used).
From my understanding, this aspect is much easier in Chinese. I'm not disagreeing with you, since I'm not qualified being that I don't know Chinese. But, if you think that the number of characters is what makes Japanese reading and writing difficult, you are wrong.
In my experience, (I have
In my experience, (I have taken a year and a half of university level Mandarin and a year of university level Japanese, as well as a lot of hours studying on my own) I find Mandarin much easier to learn than Japanese in most aspects. So I don't think you can generalize really. People are individuals and some languages are easier to pick up than others depending on the person. I've had to study Japanese 10 times harder to even come close to my proficiancy level in Mandarin, but that's just me. Good luck to everyone! Study hard!
Damn Japanese! Curse them for
Damn Japanese! Curse them for creating such a hard-ass language!
Imagine how hard it is for
Imagine how hard it is for Japanese people to learn the English language. They probably also think that it is a "hard-ass language".
Japanese is by far more
Japanese is by far more complex when it comes to writing systems. English is more difficult to speak for sure.I think Japanese is one of the hardest languages to gain fluency in writing and reading.
They are う verbs because they
They are う verbs because they end in う。
No, actually, u-verbs have
No, actually, u-verbs have nothing to do with う.
it's just all verbs not ending with iru/eru plus a few additional ones ending in iru/eru, as stated above.
If you look at the non-past
If you look at the non-past negative case (~nai), the ~u verbs are all written with an 'a' before the nai. In the words you mentioned: kaerAnai, kirAnai,shaberAnai.
I don't get why these verbs
I don't get why these verbs 帰る, 切る, しゃべる & 入る are in the u-verbs section. Aren't those verbs supposed to be in the ru-verbs section?
These verbs are exceptions as
These verbs are exceptions as mentioned on the previous page.
tae kim says, "to make things
tae kim says,
"to make things interesting, I've also included a number of u-verbs that also end in eru/iru",
so those that you mentioned are the "u-verbs that also end in eru/iru".
They conjugate differently
They conjugate differently from the verbs in the u-verbs section.
For example: 帰る, 帰って, 帰らない, 帰ります.
Instead of: 帰て, 帰ない, 帰ます.
You can also easily recognize them, as the え/い-sounds are included in the kanji's pronunciation and not written outside, as it is the case with f.e. 食べる and 起きる.
Yes, but that's also the case
Yes, but that's also the case with some ru-verbs, such as 見る.
Those one's in particular are
Those one's in particular are special verbs that get conjugated like u-verbs even though they end in iru or eru. For example, hairu in it's ~masu form would be hairimasu, not haimasu. There are some more special verbs, I think you can probably look them up on google.
No, those are u-verbs. I
No, those are u-verbs. I don't know why they are (or more importantly, how to figure out), though.
I suppose that's for pronoun purposes: if 売る where a ru-verb, negative form should have been うない instead of うらない, and that's horrific. Or 切る, if it where a ru-verb, its past form would have been きた, same as 来た, instead of きれた. Nevertheless this very thing i'm nopt really sure about (for example the 着る verb has exactly the same pronouns of 切る in any of its forms).
Suppose that's a thing you just have to get used to, trying to guess istinctively once you've made up some experience.
The purpose of that appendix
The purpose of that appendix was to show a few verbs which end in iru/eru but are still u-verbs. The iru/eru thing is just a rule of thumb. You should always look it up in wwwjdic to make sure its correct. It should say v5 for u-verbs and v1 for ru-verbs.
Hi. Let's inflect them and
Hi. Let's inflect them and see:
帰る -> 帰ります
切る -> 切ります
しゃべる -> しゃべります
入る -> 入ります
See that all る changed to り here. If these verbs were so called 'ru-verbs', the る would have been dropped altogether and they would have been inflected like this:
帰ます; 切ます; しゃべます; 入ます
...which is incorrect, and thus they must be so called 'u-verbs'. Hope that answers you question.
U-verbs (五段) include not only
U-verbs (五段) include not only those ending with a う, す, く, ぬ etc but also a handful that end with a る in much the same manner. They're common exceptions to the ～る => ru-verb "rule", and a bit of a pain to learn -- unless of course you can divine the magical way Japanese native speakers seem to just intrinsically "know" what category a previously unencountered verb falls into...
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