I’m learning grammar on Bunpro, alongside Wanikani and some vocabulary Anki decks. I’m already at the point where I learned all N5 grammar points in Bunpro, and a few from N4, but conjugation is still the silent killer of my progress. I very often find myself in a situation, where I use the correct grammar point and everything is right, but I used one wrong kana, because I struggle with conjugating verbs, adjectives. I dont understand the ichidan or godan difference etc.
I read somewhere that conjugation is extremely important, apparently there’s not much new conjugation in future grammar, and most of it build on top of the conjugation rules from N5. So it makes sense to me, that I would want to sit down and drill that to perfection, so that future grammar is only easier and my conjugation is always on point.
I’m sure many of you went through this as well, so my question is: Do you have any resources/apps/tools you’d recommend, to practice conjugation rules? What did you use, and would you recommend it? I am the type of person that absolutely hates drilling rules into my head, and learn much faster through practice, so maybe a short explanation + drilling exercises would be best for me.
Honestly most of the time I just use this. There’s not any drilling exercises, but there are a lot of example sentences for each of the conjugations. Or if there’s a specific verb I’m looking to conjugate, put it into jisho and can check if it’s godan or ichidan or if I just wanna cheat click show inflections. But this is more to just double check.
As for how I first learnt them, mostly I’ve forgotten. But I learnt て form (from the ます) to the tune of Frère Jacques.
I learned verb conjugations through Genki, which has an associated workbook with a lot of drills for conjugating verbs at N5 level (short form/long form/て form). There’s a free online version of the activities from both the textbook and workbook that might be of interest to you, since it cuts out the actual textbook stuff and mostly just has practice exercises (just CTRL+F search on the page for “conjugation”).
These activities are pretty one-and-done though, so maybe you can try them out after @RebBlue’s recommended reading and then continue on with @CandyKale’s excellent resource!
I would second using Genki for this, as it will gradually introduce them to you and is nice enough to include complete tables. What helped me was picking one verb for each possible dictionary ending (死ぬ, 読む, 聞く, etc) and writing the conjugations down in a notebook repeatedly until I could recall them at a moment’s notice. Then you will know all the conjugations for any verb with a similar root, excluding する and くる. You unfortunately cannot tell the difference between godan and ichidan by looking at the form of the verb, but you will build intuition on which ones are ichidan or not if you study enough verb conjugations.
When I started learning, I found that the best way for me to remember was to build my own table of verb stuff and add to it as I learned so that I could look things up that I should know. The good news is that Japanese verbs etc, are simple enough that you can fit all of the info you need on a small piece of paper.
This is an early version of it (Sept 2020, apparently ) for godan verbs (may contain errors, do not trust):
So for a trivial example, if I wanted to say ‘want to swim’, I can see that the ‘want’ part means adding ‘たい’ to the end of the い stem of the verb. So starting with 泳ぐ, you get the い stem which is 泳ぎ and add たい, 泳ぎたい. Simple. I had a second table for the て / た forms of the various verb endings, and another for the ordering of more complex things, so I could say 泳ぎたくなかった or whatever.
Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying keeping track of what I learned in some handy format so that I could go back to it if I needed to refresh my memory was much more useful to me than verb drills or textbook exercises. In the end, once you’ve learned it and put it in your learned things list the only way to embed it in your brain is to use the knowledge over and over again.
) for godan verbs (may contain errors, do not trust):