Except Genki doesn’t teach what you posted. I have the book open right in front of me. The chart never once references masu form. It does exactly what I stated.
1 Like
Can you give some examples of verbs you mix up between ichidan and godan? If you give some examples we can probably help clear up your confusion.
1 Like
Genki is a perfectly good book to learn basic grammar, but it does have a “style”. In my opinion, cross-referencing multiple sources for important grammar is always a good idea, like the aforementioned Tae Kim site.
You will get a sense for ichidan and godan verbs over time, from reading, using them, and doing all of your exercises. It seems like a daunting task at first, but it’s not so bad. I don’t think it would help to have WaniKani add more forms as the vocab in here is really just a first exposure that doesn’t give you much context of any kind. The real value will be when you see it again in context.
Trust me, you’ll be fine 
2 Likes
Happy to be entertaining to at least some of you. 
But no, I’m fairly sincere in my feelings that these forms SHOULD be more visible on the cards.
You can, of course, go down the @anon54313967 way and focus on the gramatical mistakes I make while making my point, completely ignoring what I’m trying to say, but I’d rather mean to take that one te-form mistake I just made as motivation why that form is important to learn.
1 Like
Uh, that’s kind of an important thing to know.
I agree. But not through WK. There are some great sites like the following that will drill you on conjugation:
Putting aside that it’s outside the scope of WK for a moment, look at it this way, would you really want to balloon your lessons with things that you will eventually no longer need to know?
6 Likes
You made well more than one mistake… You even confused verb forms with other completely unrelated, grammatical structures. And considering that most conjugations are neither based on ます nor て forms your original point was not even valid from the get go. Learning only ます and て forms is woefully inadequate to learn verb conjugation.
6 Likes
The thing is, Genki doesn’t teach the way this person claims. Here’s how it actually teaches the negative conjugation for example:
It’s essentially no different to Tae Kim and any other sane grammar resource. There’s no conjugating to ます first and then dropping ます to then go to the あ row.
2 Likes
So if we agree on that, why are we arguing for opposing ideas?
Or would you agree that the distinction needs be made more obvious on WK?
What’s not obvious? Verbs are already marked for ichidan vs godan.
2 Likes
This place isn’t reddit.
5 Likes
Right, but Genki does introduce the -masu form before anything and treats it like is the default verb form, so it’s not surprising that someone would develop a (bad) habit of working backwards from it.
I took a class at a language center before, jumping in halfway through Genki II, and people would correct me if I referred to a verb by the dictionary form. I was annoyed.
3 Likes
Sure, this is a good point. I just wanted to correct anything from above that was stating that Genki taught the super convoluted method of conjugation claimed above.
2 Likes
Here’s a nice place to conjugate until you can’t feel your fingers anymore: Don's Japanese Conjugation Drill
There is an ios app called Conjugation Drill or something like that that is the same or similar.
5 Likes
No, the part we disagree on is that I don’t think it needs to be on WK at all. It’s a Kanji reading site and that would fall outside the scope.
7 Likes
Huh… fancy that.
Guess the prof re-iterating the “get the verb stem first” way over and over again led me to remember it being that way in the book, too. 
Sorry, my mistake.
But this topic isn’t about my bad memory, is it?
Besides, it’s the same thing.
“take the -ru off and add -nai if it’s a ru-verb otherwise take the final -u off and add -anai”
IS the same as
“take the verb stem and shift to -a (in the u-verb case), then add -nai”
Now what are you using to display that?
Because when I’m learning vocab, it’s actually displayed WAY out at the edge of your peripheral vision
And when I’m reviewing stuff, I need to actually clap open the item details to see it at all.
So no, I wouldn’t say that it’s obvious.
1 Like
Except that the latter has nothing to do with “-masu form” as you claimed
7 Likes
Yes, actually, because the verb stem IS the masu-form without the -masu.
(Or at least that’s the way Genki introduces it, which – as I’ve been informed in this thread – is a shit way. )
But that’s still not the same as what you posted. You went from つ → ち → た which is not the same as simply dropping the う and adding あない. One is again a two step process that is simply and easy to understand. Your’s requires conjugating into some other unrelated form in the middle and then going from the い to あ row. Why make it so much harder than it needs to be?
But at this point it’s beating a dead horse. And lastly, WK isn’t probably unlikely to add all these unnecessary extra reviews so it’s moot anyway. Peace out.
Fair point.
But it had been the way I’d been taught it, so of course that’s what I based my argumentation on.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, can you please answer the question about what you used to display these verbs?
Because the whole point of this topic was based on – no, not my terrible grammar – but that I thought the distinction is not made clear enough.
If it can be made clearer, then I’m happy to agree that we don’t necessarily need the extra forms (while maintaining that it would be nice to have them anyway)
I wasn’t proposing extra reviews, I was proposing extra info.
I’d be happy enough if we had the forms only in the learning phase.
But my idea was to randomly query one of the forms in a review (or all three at the same time, ideally), not add reviews for all three forms separately (which I agree would be extra work we could all do without).
1 Like
The stem of 待つ is [mat]. I think this is a bit too off topic, though. To respond to your initial suggestion, adding conjugations to WK would only make reviews more tedious. Conjugation isn’t hard and you will get the hang of it quickly enough. Having conjugations on WK would be like having 100 cards for every counter kanji. The dictionary form is all you need, really
8 Likes