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I almost always recommend Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese. The information is well organized in my opinion, and shows both the ‘proper’ and the ‘practical’ side of Japanese. There is a lot of info and examples, and I enjoy that the site reads like it was meant for an adult learning japanese.
Of course, anki decks are never a bad thing either.
Already got that, but that’s not really that useful in this case because he uses his own names for the verb forms so if I wanted to quickly review to remember I would need to bookmark every section
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That’s just because no one has voted for it yet! 
It doesn’t have 0 stars, it just hasn’t been rated 
Give me one sec and I’ll rate it 
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Basic principle: most of the verb forms are contracted, which is one of the reasons why they are so hard to remember. The rules themselves are really simple, but the contractions are not. First point: all verbs have 5 basic conjugations that correspond to the five vowels (for “u” verbs). Let’s take 飲む as an example:
飲む (sentence ending/adjectival form) – 私は飲む (I drink), 飲む人 (the person who drinks)
飲ま (imperfective: indicates the verbs action either hasn’t started or at the least hasn’t finished) – (飲まない (I don’t/won’t drink)
飲み (conjuctive: turns the verb into a noun and allows it to attach to other words) 飲み放題 (all you can drink)
飲め (potential: indicates possibility or ability) 飲める (I can drink)
飲も (volitional: indicates intention or will) 飲もう (Let’s drink/I shall drink)
Ru verbs are easier, because they all just drop “る” and leave it at that
All of the above are pretty straightforward, except 1: the conjuctive form. This is because in Japanese, the “i” sound is often contracted. This occurs when conjugating the te-from, the past tense, and a whole other slew of seemingly complicated conjugations. Let’s look.
Te-form: 飲みて is the original form (you’ll see it in really old books). However, the “i” contracts and the voiced “m” sound is transferred to “te” to make it “de” --> 飲んで
Past tense: 飲みた is the original form. Contracted, it’s 飲んだ.
There are a whole host of other rules depending on the consonant. If you’re interested to learn about them, let me know and I’ll write more. In general, just remember that when it gets weird, it’s usually because of contractions that no one bothered to explain.
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Similar response to the one above.
Maybe looking some of Cure Dolly’s video (yeah is a 3D character… I know… it’s weird… but explains it very well too ) could give you some clarity on what japanese “conjugations” are. As to why they end up looking confusing.
I wouldrecommend watch and put attention to a good explanation, and then you can SRS all you want, read, etc…, to cement it better 
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Very cool. I see there is one for counters too.
Did you make this?
No, found it on Wikipedia. It’s easier to see the regularity of the verbs with it, when I read “masu-form” somewhere I already know it will not end well 
So true. lol Well thanks for sharing!
Because if someone uses that term instead of something else…?
Reading does help the most. Exposure is the best way to understand grammar. You’ll also see even “rarer” verb forms pretty much all the time. I’ve never srsed any grammar like this, personally.
Also
It might help to know that it’s not actually a bunch of verb forms, but a bunch of separate particles and auxiliary verbs. You don’t really need to learn, say, みたら as a form of みる. Rather, た is an auxiliary verb and たら is its hypothetical form, and it attaches to the -masu stem (
@acm2010). Or just remember たら as it’s own auxiliary verb if you like.
Just a suggestion though. Remembering them as verb endings or as separate grammatical points doesn’t have any material difference, but sometimes thinking of things in a different way can help.
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It is usually taught that the masu is actually part of the verb, then goes on with “remove the masu, change the thing in front of the masu, blabla”.
i-row: conjunctive makes a lot more sense.
Well, maybe it’s a factor of not looking at many beginners resources… to me there are just a bunch of names people use and I see them here and there and I figure as long as people know what something refers to it’s not such a big deal.
You could refer to it that way without having a weird “the version ending in ‘masu’ is the main verb” style of teaching, but maybe there’s a correlation I just don’t get exposed to.
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I blame the teaching resources for Japanese for people struggling with perfectly regular things. The problem is figuring the regularity out in the first place, once you know how it works it is irrelevant how you call it. Some resources actively hide the regularity, and they usually begin with the introduction of the “masu-form”.
To add to what you said, I think “it’s just a bunch of suffixes” (I use “suffix” as the more neutral term, so as not to get drawn into debates about whether they’re auxiliaries or particles or bound forms or …) has its pros and cons. I personally use that approach a lot, and it’s great for reading.
However, it does have the issue of abstracting a bit too much, IMHO, in that it tends to make you forget things such as the order in which suffixes should be chained, so, for production, is somewhat suboptimal. I almost never speak Japanese, so that’s OK for me, though. (And it depends what you put in there as suffixes of course.)
The other thing is that with stuff like たら from た, again, I personally see the (etymological) connection, as you do, but I’m not sure it helps that much, as far as the contemporary sense is concerned. Beginners might be better served learning its uses separately at first, as you also suggested.
In a way, it’s the classic dilemma of teaching: how much insight is too much? It’s similar to how you (or someone) may like to remember all the -kar- forms (かった, からず, …) as being from -ku ar-; I’m not sure it would help to start from that (maybe it would?). What’s certain is that it comes in handy when you study more formal grammar, where stuff never contracts, but other than that… Or even for the -te form. I am often tempted to tell beginners that the form is from sound changes of the various -i syllables (as has been done in this thread), but does that really help them? It helps once you get to either literary (where it doesn’t change) or dialects, where sometimes the dialect has taken the other possible sound change (i.e., typically the vocalic change instead of the Tokyo-standard consonantal change), but if you learn all that stuff from the get go, won’t you just struggle trying to produce anything, while reciting all the rules in your head?
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As someone who has a couple of kids, they learn conjugation by using whatever version they can remember and then having someone correct them, then they tend to repeat their original phrase with the new conjugation in and its all just contextual and event based memory.
for example “I runned to the shop and buyed a drink”
“Ran… you ran to the shop and you bought not buyed a drink”
“oh, i … ran (looks at me for confirmation or further correction) to the shop and I … bought (again looks to me for the correction) a drink”
This happens over and over with reducing frequency of correction.
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The trick is having people who will correct you early and often. People don’t really like correcting adults, though.
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