Don's Japanese Conjugation Drill

I’ve made a conjugation drill for those that want to practice conjugations for verbs, い adjectives and な adjectives.

“Oh, another one?” you may ask…

Hang on because this one is a bit different than your average exercise drill. Often I found that drills would focus on one particular conjugation type and then get you to do a dozen or so. By the time you get to the end, you can perform some kind of transformation but you’ve likely forgotten why you’re doing it.

My drill gets you do three things every time:

  1. Understand what kind of conjugation the question gives you.
  2. Perform some change (or not with the trick questions, but you have to work that out)
  3. Answer with the new conjugation.

Example screens

Conjugation forms

Currently it supports (and you can select which ones):

  • Plain form
  • Polite form
  • Negative form
  • Past form
  • て form
  • Progressive form
  • Desire / たい form
  • Volitional form
  • Potential form
  • Imperative form
  • Passive form
  • Causative form

And many combinations of the above!

Question focus

The drill now has the ability to focus on particular transformations so you can tick the conjugation forms that you know but just focus on a particular transformation between them.

image

Please give it a try and give me your feedback!

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Hooray! I can’t wait to check it out! :slight_smile:

Are the past and negative forms polite past and negative (~ました、~ません/~ませんでした/~なかった (or is that one casual? I don’t use that one…)) or casual past and negative (~た、じゃ__~ない)?

Most of those forms I haven’t learned yet.

All combinations of those. If you select “plain”, “past” and “negative” then it will do all 4 combinations of those three. If you select “plain”, “polite”, “past” and “negative” then it will ask you questions about all 8 combinations of those.

Point being that you can unselect “plain” for example and focus on how you go between polite, polite negative, polite past and polite past negative. That would be useful for people that have learned polite form and not plain form.

Super cool @doncr!

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Thanks! :slight_smile:

Ooohh… (But for casual/plain, how does that become 4 types? Don’t you mean 3? Unless you’re including ~なかった separately from じゃ__~ない…?)

That’s pretty cool!

I think I’d stick to all of those + ~て form for now, as I believe that’s all that Genki I covered for me so far… (if not, I’m totally forgetting stuff). I’ve done very little practice, only wrote out a few verbs I’d learned from WK in all the forms I “knew” so far… (like 8 or 10 max? I think I included ~ましょう).

I’m going to try it now. (Does it go by verbs learned according to my WK level?)

[EDIT: Somebody please correct me - which kind of past is ~なかった, casual or formal/polite past? EDIT 2: Nevermind, just looked up a verb on Jisho.org… turns out it was casual past all along. Just surprised when I heard the Samurai Gourmet MC use it, then… thought since he was retired, it would be polite.]

Oh no… I have no idea which are group 1 or group 2… (Will that affect the test?)

I know them as Ichidan (one change) or Godan (five changes) and/or る/う. Having seen @jstrout’s thread on Verb Classes (I was all… “WTF is a class?!”) then somewhere in the thread it seemed like Class 1 (is that even the same as Group 1?) wasn’t Ichidan, but was instead Godan, which to me makes absolutely no sense. (Especially since it’s easier to learn the easier verb form first! Which is both how Genki and Nihongonomori presented the verbs to me.)

Could you please expand that check-box system to also say Ichidan and Godan beside the corresponding groups? Maybe る and う for the people who learned it solely that way?

Yes, the four types if you choose “plain”, “negative” and “past” would be (for 飲む):

  • Plain - 飲む
  • Plain negative - 飲まない
  • Plain past - 飲んだ
  • Plain past negative - 飲まなかった

If you were to also select “polite” as well, then you would have to work with these:

  • plain - 飲む
  • negative - 飲まない
  • polite - 飲みます
  • polite negative - 飲みません
  • past - 飲んだ
  • past negative - 飲まなかった
  • polite past - 飲みました
  • polite past negative - 飲みませんでした

And no, it doesn’t link to your vocabulary on WaniKani. I deliberately chose a set of verbs that cover examples of group 1, group 2 and くる / する verbs. The いく verb is listed separately because it is also a special case for a few conjugations.

Yeah, good point about that. I’ll change the labels.

I thought that was why you had いく separate… surprised the kanji aren’t used for the three of those.

Also… now I’m positive that this is wrong after your post…

Edit: since you do mean dictionary form when you say plain form. Came across that for my first question.

Thanks! ^^

EDIT 2: I also had trick questions unchecked.

Er… and this???

Or am I just missing something…?

OK.

So that’s the plain past negative form of 作る. If you make that into the plain form, as opposed to polite for example, then it is still 作らなかった.

“Plain” does not automatically mean affirmative and present tense! It just means plain form.

That’s… kind of really confusing.
Shouldn’t it say “plain past” then? Or something?
I love that you made this - it just doesn’t seem obvious (to me at least) what it’s asking for.

Keeping what you just said in mind… this happened:

… I set it to only 5 questions… So far I’m 3 for 3, not getting what’s being asked of me. O.o

No! You are not allowed to fall asleep!

If it was like that then you don’t have to understand the conjugated form that you’re given.

The trick here is that the drill demands you read and understand conjugated forms just as much as to be able to produce them yourself.

Well I could read it - but it wasn’t asking me what form it was, either…

@_@

EDIT: For that last one, I told myself “it’s past formal negative” … so… “maybe “polite” here means it wants past polite instead of past polite negative?”

@_@

Really hoping to hear feedback from others - I hope others understand and get this more.

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OK, I think perhaps I need to add an “explain why?” button.

What happened in that question is that you were given 休みませんでした which is 休む in polite, past and negative.

The polite form of polite past negative is still polite, past and negative.

Hence the answer is 休みませんでした.

To prove to you that I get what you’re saying here, I got question 4 right:

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But… it’s only asking for “polite!”…

I had to make an assumption for that question above (#4).

I feel like this requires a lot of guesswork? O.o
I understand what you’re saying… however the questions aren’t clear (to me).
EDIT: That’s a little too ambiguous…

Great stuff!

I have worked on the psychology of this test quite a bit. It is designed to frustrate you by not giving your brain signals to latch onto that let you avoid doing the three tasks for each question.