Present tense

Japanese verbs do not agree with anybody. 食べます tabemasu is I eat, you eat, she eats, we eat. There is no person, no number, and no future tense either — this one form covers "I eat" and "I will eat". What there is instead is a beautifully regular machine for bolting suffixes onto stems, and it is worth learning as a machine rather than as a pile of rules.

One rule: stem + suffix

To conjugate a verb, append a suffix to its stem.

That is it. The textbook version — "ichidan verbs do this, godan verbs do that, memorise which is which" — describes the output of the machine instead of the machine.

Verbs come with one of two kinds of stem:

The * is a reminder that the stem stops on a consonant and is waiting for a vowel.

Secret vowels

Suffixes carry a vowel in brackets. It appears only when the stem needs one — that is, when the stem ends in a consonant:

tabe  + (i)masu  →  tabemasu     the stem already ends in a vowel; (i) is not needed
nom*  + (i)masu  →  nomimasu     the consonant stem takes the (i)
kak*  + (i)masu  →  kakimasu

Two verb "groups", one rule. Nothing is irregular here; the bracketed vowel is simply surfacing or not.

Think in kana, never in rōmaji

The arithmetic only works if you compute in Japanese sounds. There is no し-less "si" in the language:

hanas* + (i)masu  →  hanashimasu  話します   (s + i = し, not "si")
mats*  + (i)masu  →  machimasu    待ちます   (t + i = ち)
mats*  + (u)      →  matsu        待つ      (t + u = つ)

This is the same fact the Sounds page makes about the kana grid: five slots in it broke, and every conjugation table inherits those breaks. They are not exceptions to conjugation — they are exceptions to the spelling of the syllabary.

The suffixes

Read down the last two columns and you can see the machine working: the same suffix, the vowel appearing only where a consonant stem needs it.

Where the vowels come from

The credit for this framing goes to Dan Abramov, Japanese Verb Conjugation the Simple Hard Way — it is the clearest account of the system we have found, and the rest of these chapters use his notation.

The three verbs that really are irregular

する is the workhorse: attach it to almost any noun and you have a verb — 勉強する benkyō suru (study), 電話する denwa suru (phone), コピーする kopī suru (photocopy).

Right now vs generally

The plain present covers habits and futures. For something in progress, use the て form + いる:

食べています tabete imasu — I am eating 住んでいます sunde imasu — I live (a state, not an action in progress)

The て form is where the machine gets its one messy corner — see Past tenses.

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