I need some help working on listening and reading conjugations, mostly verbs of course. Given enough time I can figure out how a word is conjugated and what it means but I'm looking for ways to practice them so that it becomes much more natural. I'm aware that simply reading and listening more will help, obviously, but since I'm not doing full immersion I feel like that might take a while when there could be a more effective method to use on top of the usual reading and listening practice.

What I'm looking for are suggestions or brainstorming on additional ways to get better with conjugations. So, to lets start with a question!

What did YOU do to work on your comprehension of word conjugations?

会いたくてたまらなくなる - The most ultimate conjugation i've come across thus far.

I think as time goes on you just get used to conjugations. For me, conjugations are become words in and of themselves as opposed to the notion of a conjugation.

I feel really effective practice is to take one sentence and conjugate it every way you can possibly think of and get used to saying it outloud every different way you can think of from memory. Drill it

I never specifically worked on conjunctions- I think it is one of those things best left to natural listening. Eventually you'll get it. I think there are just too many to practice.

mezbup Wrote:I think as time goes on you just get used to conjugations. For me, conjugations are become words in and of themselves as opposed to the notion of a conjugation.

I think this is the best way to tackle it, really. Just find sentences of the verbs in their conjugated forms and learn them as separate ways. That's what is gonna happen eventually, anyway. You can't continually be doing word equations in your head and not find a shortcut (in this case... learning them as the separate words they are).

mezbup Wrote:I think as time goes on you just get used to conjugations. For me, conjugations are become words in and of themselves as opposed to the notion of a conjugation.

　The more grammar I read up on, the more I seem to tend toward this notion myself, so I definitely think you're onto something here.

brandon7s Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:I think as time goes on you just get used to conjugations. For me, conjugations are become words in and of themselves as opposed to the notion of a conjugation.

　The more grammar I read up on, the more I seem to tend toward this notion myself, so I definitely think you're onto something here.

Especially for things like なる you just hear it so often... obviously in English the phrase "made (something)" is used all the time. Like he made me so angry for example. When native speakers express this point they don't "conjugate a verb" they just tack on なる however they need to get that point across. Same with なければならない, i've just come to think of it in terms of "got to do this".

Some conjugations are just so crazy though. It's like a puzzle the way words can go together like in my aforementioned example. There has to be some conjugation that just seems absolutely infinite but could actually be understood. I wonder what It is?

captal Wrote:I never specifically worked on conjunctions- I think it is one of those things best left to natural listening. Eventually you'll get it. I think there are just too many to practice.

I'm personally a fan of systematically understanding and practicing grammar (learned most of my English and Japanese this way), but of course you still have to get a "feel" for common patterns (like the aforementioned なければならない).

In any case, I've never seen anyone try to teach romance languages (which have more complex conjugation rules) without systematic grammar. So I guess the same might apply to Japanese (even if Japanese grammar isn't that difficult in comparison).

I had a similar problem with the passive forms, and you know what I did to fix it? I just printed a table of conjugations and taped it to my desk and when I had a spare moment I would look at it. Don't worry about understanding every single nuance or drilling yourself through it. Conjugations are common enough that if you expose yourself to regular JP you can't help but get good at them. Give it time, make an effort to watch out for them where they occur, and before you know it you'll be golden. In the beginning you learn to understand things in terms of structure as it relates to meaning, but after that you will just feel the meaning alone without the structure. When you speak you'll feel less like you're conjugating on the fly and more like you're lifting and copying larger chunks of meaning "as is".

Having a conjugation table visible is a good idea!

Could also make a "master conjugations with dorama" deck. That'd be fun to use and learn from.

I'd like something that I can use to quickly drill a lot of word+conjugation forms very quickly. I can easily create an Anki deck that has a slew of different word+conjugation combinations which that would help with reading but not with listening. Finding audio for them would be the real problem. I suppose I could try Text-to-Speech, but I doubt that it'd sound nearly natural enough to be of practical practice.

brandon7s Wrote:I'd like something that I can quickly drill a lot of word+conjugation forms very quickly, and I can easily create an Anki deck that has a slew of different word+conjugation combinations, which that would help with reading, but not with listening. Finding audio for them would be the real problem. I suppose I could try Text-to-Speech, but I doubt that it'd sound nearly natural enough to be of practical practice.

If by a combined effort everyone made a deck from dorama it'd be easily searchable.

All you need to do is get dorama with Japanese subs, Sub2Srs them with context option on, import into anki with a production and recognition mode and boom. A deck that can be used like a conjugation dictionary, if you wan't to know examples audio and all, just search, unsuspend and study. It'd be brilliant.

mezbup Wrote:会いたくてたまらなくなる - The most ultimate conjugation i've come across thus far.

That isn't one giant conjugation, it is several words/particles making a sentence.

会う conjugated to 会い
たい conjugated to たく
て (aka て form when combined with above)
たまる conjugated to たまら
ない conjugated to なく
なる

Japanese conjugation is very simple if you ignore the dumbed down explanations of most English language books (there are only 6 conjugations in total). They think it is easier to throw a whole bunch of suffixes at the learner as if they were conjugations than to actually explain anything. Even て form is a dumbed down explanation of one of the basic conjugations plus a particle. Conjugation is something that you should master in a couple days, not something to limp along with with some crutches.

Jarvik7 Wrote:That isn't one giant conjugation, it is several words/particles making a sentence.

会う conjugated to 会い
たい conjugated to たく
て (aka て form when combined with above)
たまる conjugated to たまら
ない conjugated to なく
なる

Nice break down, Jarvik. I was going to ask someone to do that, because it wasn't making sense from a "typical conjugation" viewpoint, if that makes any sense.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Japanese conjugation is very simple if you ignore the dumbed down explanations of most English language books (there are only 6 conjugations in total). They think it is easier to throw a whole bunch of suffixes at the learner as if they were conjugations than to actually explain anything. Even て form is a dumbed down explanation of one of the basic conjugations plus a particle. Conjugation is something that you should master in a couple days, not something to limp along with with some crutches.

I've just been using Tae Kim's guide for conjugations, and I've only been looking them up as I come upon them. I just started working through the Core2000 series, so I've run into only a few that I needed to look up.

Do you have any resources that you can recommend? I'm all for mastering conjugation in a couple of days.

mezbup Wrote:If by a combined effort everyone made a deck from dorama it'd be easily searchable.

All you need to do is get dorama with Japanese subs, Sub2Srs them with context option on, import into anki with a production and recognition mode and boom. A deck that can be used like a conjugation dictionary, if you wan't to know examples audio and all, just search, unsuspend and study. It'd be brilliant.

Unfortunately, I've not really delved into the field of dorama yet. I could do this with anime, but I think finding Japanese subtitles for anime is quite a bit more difficult. I agree though, it would be brilliant. I guess I just need to start watching dorama.

I personally think the way to learn them is to get a good basic understanding of the grammar and to get lots of exposure to the different conjugations to internalize them. I don't know what you level is, but if you are still relatively early in the learning process a good resource is

essential japanese verbs by coscom

Personally I don't really agree with people breaching the copyright on this resource, but if you hunt around on this site you may find links to an anki deck containing the material.

This CD presents a verb and its conjugations and then some sample sentences. The good thing about the CD is it has definitions for all the vocab to save you having to look things up. It only covers 250 verbs but that is a good start.

I think Tae Kim's explanations are good too.

My suggestion would be to write yourself out a chart of the basic conjugation patterns and memorise it. As Jarvik7 says, there aren't that many (even if I wouldn't personally go for splitting 会いたい into 会い+たい...), and it makes the patterns clearer. That gives you a scaffold you can use so that you can actually use the things, even if a bit haltingly (particularly useful if you need to actually speak now rather than being able to wait for your brain to absorb things over time ). Then time and practice will make them sink in and become natural so you don't have to think about them at all. Oh, and just go ahead and learn する and くる since they're irregular. If you've got the basic patterns solidly mastered, then things like 会いたくてたまらなくなる are just straightforward combinations.

@Jarvik: Yes indeed it's just a combination of things You mentioned て being more like a particle (yes?) cos that's kinda how I've been seeing it lately too. I guess I touted the whole thing as a conjugation because I see it as 1 word and a whole lot of shit acting on it explaining why the word is being used

@pm215: Why not split it? There is no such verb form as "want form". 会いたい is simply the 連用形 (conjunctive form/conjugation) of 会う plus the particle たい. 会いたい is no more a conjugation of 会う than 私は is a conjugation of 私. It's just word + particle.

@mezbup: To be technical, て is a conjugation of the particle つ, but that is getting into classical.

I have no idea how they teach conjugations, but how do they dissect something like this?

会いたくてたまらなくなってしまったんだと言われましても、困ってしまいます。

On a serious note, there is a sure-fire test to see if you have already internalized a phrase. Just say the phrase you want to test and see if you can come up with multiple realistic situations where the phrase in question is typically used. You already internalized it if you're like "Oh, XXX? A spoiled kid in a bad mood would say it to his mom. If it's in a bit softer tone, you can hear a teenager say that to his friends on any day of the week." If you are like "Oh, this is the past tense of YYY. So it should mean something like YYYed. I guess I heard it before a few times, but I don't know if that's typical or not," then you need more input.

The goal is to be able to come up with realistic situations for virtually any common phrases. If you want to move a phrase to your active vocabulary, what you should do is get more and more input to the extent that when you run into a situation where the phrase is typically used and represents your thought, it naturally pops up in your mind without thinking about it.

I think the same goes for nearly everything about language.

@brandon, magamo

They don't really teach conjugations properly in any standard (English language) Japanese textbook or course I've read. I learned "the bad way" first and then learned "the real way" when I was studying classical and linguistics. One problem is that no book I've seen acknowledges that some particles can conjugate. They just treat these as conjugations of the words to which the particle can attach. That is likely why many think that 会いたい is a conjugation of 会う. They give you less to have to understand by giving you more to remember... Going full-blown linguistics will overwhelm a new student, so like I've said in other threads it is something one should return to. There is a LOT of room for improvement in current techniques though.

The best way to dissect what you (magamo) wrote would be with a syntax tree, due to its length, but that is hard to write on a forum so here is a list.

会う (verb) conjugated to 会い
たい (particle) conjugated to たく
て (particle, aka て form when combined with above)
たまる (verb) conjugated to たまら
ない (particle) conjugated to なく
なる (verb) conjugated to なり (which is reduced to なっ thanks to 音便)
て (particle, aka て form when combined with above)
しまう (verb) conjugated to しまい (which is reduced to しまっ thanks to 音便)
の (particle, colloquially modified to ん)
だ (copula)
と (particle)
言う (verb) conjugated to 言わ
れる (particle) conjugated to れ
て (particle, aka て form when combined with above)
も (particle)
困る (verb) conjugated to 困り (which is reduced to 困っ thanks to 音便)
て (particle, aka て form when combined with above)
しまう (verb) conjugated to しまい
ます (particle)

This is all pretty bare-metal stuff, so it becomes difficult to process the meaning of the sentence just based on the definitions of all the parts. The full meaning comes when you consider collocations (Ex: 〜ても or 〜んだ). In other words, sentences are more than a sum of their parts.

Jarvik7 Wrote:They don't really teach conjugations properly in any standard (English language) Japanese textbook or course I've read. I learned "the bad way" first and then learned "the real way" when I was studying classical and linguistics. One problem is that no book I've seen acknowledges that some particles can conjugate. They just treat these as conjugations of the words to which the particle can attach. That is likely why many think that 会いたい is a conjugation of 会う. They give you less to have to understand by giving you more to remember... Going full-blown linguistics will overwhelm a new student, so like I've said in other threads it is something one should return to. There is a LOT of room for improvement in current techniques though.

Out of curiosity, how exactly is it that you classify the standard textbook way as 'the bad way' and this way as 'the right way?' Is it just based on the fact that one of them is more consistent with classical Japanese? I'm not sure that's enough to call the other way bad.

I find some textbooks very bad at explaining grammar (i.e., Genki) and I think the readers might have trouble picking apart a sentence like this. But other books seem to pull it off quite well and there's no problems. I certainly don't have any trouble with that sentence, and I interpret it more in line with what you would see in a textbook. (For example, I just see the 会いたい as a big adjectival with a verbal root, and then it's put into the gerund form just like any other adjective).

@magamo
I really liked your test. Btw, I passed =D

@Jarvik
Sorry, but your explanation did not help much.
And it is much easier and more effective to memorize every form in context than to keep it all dissected.

@Tzadeck
Both are the bad way, in my opinion. Deciphering sentences like magamo's is a much better way. It is also more fun, as you can do it while enjoying things you like.

Jarvik7 Wrote:@brandon, magamo

They don't really teach conjugations properly in any standard (English language) Japanese textbook or course I've read. I learned "the bad way" first and then learned "the real way" when I was studying classical and linguistics. One problem is that no book I've seen acknowledges that some particles can conjugate. They just treat these as conjugations of the words to which the particle can attach. That is likely why many think that 会いたい is a conjugation of 会う. They give you less to have to understand by giving you more to remember... Going full-blown linguistics will overwhelm a new student, so like I've said in other threads it is something one should return to. There is a LOT of room for improvement in current techniques though.

The best way to dissect what you (magamo) wrote would be with a syntax tree, due to its length, but that is hard to write on a forum so here is a list.

会う (verb) conjugated to 会い
たい (particle) conjugated to たく

Why is たい a particle rather than just an -i adjective?

Quote:ない (particle) conjugated to なく

Same here; I don't see the need for "particle" when this is just the standard i-adjective ない; same as 本はない.

I've always heard the terminology of "particle" for something that doesn't conjugate and "suffix" for something that does.

@Tzadeck: The "right way" is the one that describes things by what they are. The "wrong way" is using good-enough explanations that gloss over much and don't fit 100%. It's the difference between knowing some grammar and understanding it (being able to drive your car and being able to rebuild the engine, for an analogy). Like I've said in other threads, it's not required knowledge but it does come in useful.

@Yudantaiteki
I should have labelled them as auxiliary verbs, but..

The ない particle isn't classed as the same word as the ない adjective, even though they are likely from the same root word. たい also isn't any adjective I'm aware of. They can have adjective style conjugation without being adjectives.. 連用形+形容詞 (投げ遠い？）isn't a productive pattern afaik, so this is likely why ない is treated as separate.

Jarvik7 Wrote:@Yudantaiteki
I should have labelled them as auxiliary verbs, but..

The ない particle isn't classed as the same word as the ない adjective, even though they are likely from the same root word. たい also isn't any adjective I'm aware of. They can have adjective style conjugation without being adjectives.. 連用形+形容詞 (投げ遠い？）isn't a productive pattern afaik, so this is likely why ない is treated as separate.

What would you say about にくい in 分かりにくい, やすい in しやすい, がたい in 信じがたい, and づらい in 分かりづらい? Are those "particles" also?

For たい, it's true that it is not a standalone adjective, but that alone shouldn't necessarily be enough to disqualify it completely from being an adjective at all.

The problem with your usage is that usually "particle" refers to something that does not inflect.