Ah thank you @Leebo ! This makes a lot of sense. With the “sweets” thought process, I honestly was just going with the non-katakana option since even though I know katakana I still don’t know when to use it much!
As far as the “ate” part, I definitely took a stab in the dark on that one. So far on Bunpro I haven’t gotten too much guidance on past/present/negative/positive things, so after looking around a bunch I just decided that was as good a guess as I could come up with. Thank you very much for the clarification!
My only question is - how did you determine the べた as being the past positive form?
One point of note: what you’re describing here is more formally known as ichidan verbs (as opposed to godan verbs, also sometimes called う-verbs). Using the る-verb/う-verb distinction gets confusing fast because there are godan/う-verbs ending in る.
Also I’m saying this way more for @anon33985902’s sake, since you do mention the terms later on so I have a slight hunch you’re well aware of this
Some simple guidelines on when something is ichidan vs godan:
if it doesn’t end in -iru or -eru, it’s a godan verb
if it does end in -iru or -eru, it’s probably an ichidan verb, but not always, there are exceptions (like 要る, which is godan)
There’s a whole list of rules, but if you remember these two and learn the exceptions as you go, you should be good most of the time.
There’s actually a reason for them being called 一段 and 五段: the verbs have either one (一) or five (五) stems for conjugation (one for each column in the kana table - one ending in a, i, u, e, and o respectively).
For ichidan verbs, you just take the る off the end and tack the conjugations off that. For godan verbs, you transform the whole verb into something ending on one of those syllables depending on the conjugation (so for instance, negation gets built on the a form, which means 行く becomes 行かない - 行か being the “stem”)
The exact transformations depend on what sound the verb ends on exactly (grammar resources will show you these).
As a fun little tidbit, there were historically also 二段 and 四段 verbs, having two and four stems respectively, but they’re no longer used in modern Japanese. 三段 has never existed though, as far as I’m aware.
It’s probably somewhat useful to be aware of both naming systems anyway, since if you use various resources you’re likely to encounter both at some point
THANK YOU @yamitenshi ! This was very helpful for me for sure. I appreciate everyone taking the time to help me with my tiny little sentence. I will refer back to this time and time again I’m sure - especially since I know next to nothing about grammar still
