After learning the potential, conditional, causative, and passive forms of verbs, on Tae Kim's site, I feel like all the conjugations have become a jumbled mess inside my head (not to mention all the various ways of saying "do" and "don't"). How did you guys go about sorting out all these conjugations? Do you think it would be worth it to make flashcards in Anki like this:

Production + recognition

Q: 見られる。
A:　見る　in potential or passive form.

Or should I not worry about it, and it'll all sort itself out through reading practice? I feel like every time I meet a verb I have to look it up and see what conjugation it is using, and I'm having a hell of a time telling potential and passive from context alone.

Is there a good site with plenty of example sentences in various conjugations (or maybe you that tests you on conjugations?) other than Tae Kim?

Thanks for any input!

Don't worry about it. Just add in the example sentences and read a lot and it'll all make sense =D

This site has all conjugations + example sentences for a great many verbs. Although sometimes the server can be a little unresponsive.

Hope it helps.

http://www.japaneseverbconjugator.com/JVerbList.asp

I don't think native speakers sort out all the conjunctions in their heads either. I think I can use them correctly most of the time, but if I were asked what the potential form of 見る is, I'd be like "Hmm. Potential? Well, it should be..., 見..., れる? Wait. It's 見られる? Ok. I'll try say a sentence or two. 'テレビが見れる.' Hm. Sounds ok. 'テレビが見られる.' Hmm? This also sounds correct. Which is the proper one?? All right. I'll say them in the past tense. 'テレビが見れた.' Sounds perfect. 'テレビが見られた.' Sounds pretentious. I know Grammar Nazis are always pretentious, so 見られる should be the correct form."

I think every basic grammar rule should be stored in your muscle memory. I suggest you make a grammar card like that only if you think it helps move the piece of knowledge to your muscle memory.

Thanks everyone.

I'm sure native speakers don't magamo, I know I don't think about tenses much when I speak (sometimes I do when I write, because I have a bad habit of mixing tenses.) It's just that the meaning of a sentence changes substantially from 食べる to 食べられる to 食べれば　to 食べるな, and I would like to grasp that meaning.

Also, I definitely can not rattle off or use one conjugation or the other off the top of my head, which is okay for now (I just got introduced to these concepts), but who knows what I'll be asked to remember for class (blah.)

Maybe this post can help:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...4#pid49634

I used to have this problem all the time. Then, I decide to stop trying to study grammar and moved to sentences. Now I learn by example(s). So... definitively make cards, but use an example sentence.

Here is your example:
Q: 見られる。
A:　見る　in potential or passive form.

Here is one of my Anki cards (my answer is 3 lines)
Q: どうやったら二人を助けられるか
A: どうやったら＝by what means
A: どうやったらふたりをたすけられるか
A: ~られる=potential/passive

After I finally learned what "~られる" meant I deleted the last line from my answer.

Don't worry about it too much, because you're still learning conjugations and it's very natural to get mixed up or not recognise a certain conjugation. But practise makes perfect, focus on a certain conjugation at a time till you're comfortable with it. Just remember to read a lot and often you can spot the meaning in context or the sentence as a whole. From time to time I also have to stop at a certain conjugation I've never seen/read/heard before and scan my head for the correct form. Often your mind will fill in the best 'translation' when you read and as you get better you'll become quicker at figuring out what conjugation is used with what meaning. Read, read and read

*and surprise, surprise! There are a lot more conjugations coming your way.

I'm starting to do cloze deletion on the Tae Kim cards I made. To answer, I type in the entire sentence, including the part that's deleted. The rest of the answer is there in case I'm not sure about what the card is teaching.

Before, I was doing it as recognition only (though typing in the sentence). Useful, but you're production ability takes a hit.

Examples:

Q: 全部[...made/let eat]。
A: 全部食べさせた。
ぜんぶたべさせた。
Made/Let (someone) eat it all.
Note - 001 Special Expressions - Causative and Passive Verbs - Causative Verbs

Q: 明日、大学に[...go, polite]。
A: 明日、大学に行きます。
あした、だいがくにいきます。
Tomorrow, go to college. (polite)
Note - 003 Essential Grammar - Polite Form and Verb Stems - Using 「～ます」 to make verbs polite

Q: 勉強をなるべく[...thought about attempting to avoid]。
A: 勉強をなるべく避けようと思った。
べんきょうをなるべくさけようとおもった。
I thought I would attempt to avoid studying as much as possible.
Note - 243 Essential Grammar - Trying something out or attempting to do something - To attempt to do something

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PS: Seeing how I changed my approach to grammar cards over time, would it be cool if Anki could somehow alter how it tests a fact based on how well you've been doing with that fact. Example with RTK would be: English keyword to kanji, after 1 month spacing it changes it to Japanese Keyword to kanji, after 1 month of that, it adds in Kanji to Japanese keyword recognition.

Ok, way too complicated, but certainly a cool idea on making cards more difficult (though in a useful way) as you get better at them.

@Nuke: It would probably be best to make a new card whenever you want to make changes to what is being tested. The scheduling of the card wouldn't make much sense if you change what the card tests.

oregum Wrote:...

Actually, that's sort of what I do now (except my cards are far more wordy because I copy big blocks of text from Tae Kim for the explanation). It's just I'm worried cramming all these rules and conjugations together in the past few days hasn't done any good for me. Maybe I just need to slow down my pace.

I actually like Nukemarine's idea for his cards. I'm lazy though, so it'll take a lot of motivation to go through these cards and do what he did. Maybe a little at a time.

Strugglebunny, it didn't take me much time at all. The original cards are just spreadsheet imports. The cloze deletion is a recent feature of Anki which makes it fast to do. Without that feature, I'd have not done it (I'm lazy truth be told).

Vosmiura, I disagree when there's overlap on the card. For example, when I switched over from RTK to Anki, I created recognition cards. Now, instead of starting all 2500 cards recognition from scratch, I had the timing match up with the production cards. For a majority of cards, this proved no problem. Perhaps 10% were failed. So that's 2200 cards that probably had correct timing and 300 cards that had timing corrected. I'm not buried in reviewing cards that had some existing memory there.

Same thing when I switched up my grammar cards from recognition/dictation to production/dictation. I'm not starting all the cards back to zero, because for majority of them, the existing spacing is good enough. For those that aren't, well, they'll come back around in time. If I'm really worried, I can re-space 1 year+ cards back to 3-4 months.

Again, this only applies to adapting/changing existing cards. New information should start at zero and build up.