I’ve been searching around for a little bit, but I haven’t found a ton of information.
Could you maybe tell me of some useful conjugations? I know some super simple ones, like polite, affirmative, past, plain, negative.
Also, more specifically, how do you conjugate a verb into a te form?
This might be helpful to you:
Tofugu has a ‘grammar’ section filled with a lot of info that would be helpful for beginners.
There are no useful or not useful conjugations. It’s the basics of japanese grammar. You just need to learn how to conjugate verbs in different groups and practice.
A lot of grammatical structures rely on you knowing the basic conjugation.
The Tofugu guide is good, you can also use other resources, like this Japanese Verb Conjugation Rules: An Ultra Guide
It doesn’t mean you need to study all of it at once. Take one verb form, study and practice it for a week, then go to next one. Don’t forget to come back to the ones you learned in the past and review them.
Yeah, I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “useful” conjugations. Consume Japanese and you will encounter constructions you don’t understand. Use that as an opportunity to learn that construction.
Thank you! This site was suuuuuper helpful!
Sorry, what I meant was more like
“What are some tips that can help me learn conjugations?”
All of them are useful. Hope that helped.
First up, the good news is that Japanese verbs are extremely regular. There are only two completely irregular verbs (する and くる), another four or five common verbs that are very slightly irregular (e.g. the past tense of 行く is いった but if it were a fully regular verb it would be いいた), and half a dozen or so slightly irregular keigo verbs. Everything else is completely regular, so you don’t need to memorise long lists of verbs the way you might in French, for instance.
Personally I like the way textbooks tend to teach conjugations, where they introduce different conjugations one or two at a time, together with the motivating sentence pattern or use that you need them for. I think that works better for most people than trying to memorize a lot of conjugations for each verb at the same time.
At some point you’ll find you want to start looking for patterns in how the verbs conjugate (maybe you’re there already), and that’s when it’s a good time to look for a website which has tables of how verbs conjugate and what the different patterns are. How soon you go looking for this probably depends on how analytical you like to be as a language learner.
However, knowing the patterns intellectually is just a stepping stone. To really know the conjugations will take time and exposure in reading and listening and use in writing and speaking. Eventually it’ll become an unconscious process and you won’t think about it any more.
I got a little book called Baron’s Japanese Grammar. It shows the different tenses. If you literally digest the chapter on verbs you will see the insane regularity of Japanese verbs. The rules can be put on a single piece of paper unlike English French or Spanish. Learning Japanese verb conjugations is rapidly satisfying compared to any European languages.
I disagree with getting spoon fed the conjugations slowly. I’m an adult. I speak in present past subjunctive progressive tenses all day long. Being taught a tense or two a semester defeats the purpose of having grown up and developed a mind capable of high levels of abstraction. With the highly regular logical organization of Japanese verbs, you should learn it all at once. After that i- and na- adjectives fall into place. I have been 100% self-study. I came up with this. Not bad for only four months on my own. It’s not 100% but it’s really close… A few typos need correction and the format needs reorganizing.
I put too much on one page so I see it as a two page document, front and back with all verb tenses, explanations like “passive causative: to be made to ____.”, a section on the two irregular verbs, the copula, irregulars like iku and a few te-forms and i-/na-adjectives.
Find the tense you need. Put your finger there. Use your other finger to trace backwards. Then connect the dots… Instant Japanese!
There’s also this cheat sheet from Wikipedia with verb endings and their uses.
I managed to get a perfect score on language knowledge for N1 only to get completely stumped by this hellscape of a flowchart.
Well, first you need to literally digest the chapter on verbs. Presumably you’re allowed to eat it one page at a time, because I’m not sure I can fit a whole chapter in my mouth at once.
That’s actually part of the test - if you can’t fit the whole chapter in, your mouth will never be able to shape itself to the alien and otherworldly sounds of the language. Who can forget the uniquely Japanese phoneme of inflating your throat and croaking like a bullfrog?
The paper hurts my tummy so I just lick the pages until the letters come off
To inject a less sarcastic note, I do think that kind of chart is useful - but I think that most of the benefit is when you yourself look through the various resources discussing verb conjugations, identify the patterns, and write out something that makes sense to you personally. That will often glue the details into your mind better than somebody else’s tables or diagrams. It’s the process that does the work more than the end product, and it doesn’t matter if what you end up drawing out doesn’t turn out to be helpful for anybody else.
Let’s say you need the passive conjugation for taberu.
Start with the dictionary form. Moving right, -ru to get tabe. The passive is label 2 so next add ra, then re then ru to get taberareru. If you needed the polite past, follow the branch to go from taberare to taberaremasen.
If you need the negative past of “mayou” then use the transform map in the lower left corner labeled “delta a”. Change the u to wa… Mayowa then add nakatta, mayowanakatta.
Hopefully now you were confused but that’s all in the past now. 
If you want daro form move left. If you need tari/tara, move down…
It has a few typos but I’ve used it against some online conjugation sites and it does give pretty good results. It’s 100000 times better than those books that conjugate in romaji. And it doesn’t take 15 linear feet of webspace to get explain and get you started using advanced verb tenses unlike a class that would take two years before teaching tabesaseranai.
Sorry for the typos. I had just woke up and was trying to be erudite before my first cup.
Have you ever seen:
taberarenakatta?
I don’t have past potential/passive/conditional/cond-passive. Is there even such a construct or is that left up to helper verbs?
Google translate says I’m putting in something that equates but sometimes even gross typos pass thru Google.
PS. Ugh! Taberarenakereba is real… The chart is going to grow way out of control 
Tabesaserarenakereba???
Or you realize that helper verbs are not “conjugations” of base verbs, but just helper verbs that attach to a given form of a verb.
Then you only need to know the forms a verb stem can have (they are only 7. Well maybe 8 if you count some sound changes that happen with what comes after).
Then you need to know the helper verbs/helper adjectives that can attach to verbs. The meaning they add and to what form they attach.
Some are irregular (like くださる, なさる orます).
Even た and て are actually helper things. Native Japanese grammar doesn’t consider 食べた as a conjugation of 食べる、but rather as the 連用形 of 食べる (which happens to be たべ) and the 助動詞 (helper verb) た.
See for example this article:
Responding to both OP’s question and to the flow chart
I think something that might help you and OP (and not make the chart out of control) is understanding what these conjugations actually are morphologically (i.e., if you break it down to its smallest bits). All these extra parts added to the verbs are actually verbs or adjectives themselves and are conjugated as such.
So taberarenakereba / たべられなければ looks like a big jumble of sounds, right? But it’s broken down quite simply.
So first, the passive:
So now you have the verb たべられる, which means “to be eaten”. There’s no need to think of its conjugations any differently than たべる’s conjugations. They are conjugated the exact same way. This is the main takeaway of my reply here.
So what about the negative form? Well, just as たべる → たべない, たべられる → たべられない. And the negative past tense of たべられる is just like the negative past tense of たべる as well. So you get たべられなかった.
Now what about ない → なければ? ない is an adjective, and all adjectives’ conditional form is +ければ:
-させる is an auxiliary verb too. And since it’s a verb, you can make it passive. The passive of させる is させられる/ So instead of thinking of させられなければ as one big chunk of sounds that means “causitive-passive-negative-conditional”, you can think of each part individually.
The flow chart does get to the same result, but it’s also quite confusing to look at (for those of us who didn’t make it). But if it works for you @Jeyeballs then keep using it
Edit: @YanagiPablo beat me to it 
but hopefully you find both of our replies helpful together!
