Memorizing verb forms... e.g. -tara

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 (:wink: @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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