Verb Vocabulary
“An idealist believes that the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.” - Sidney J. Harris
Before you begin looking at verb vocabulary, there’s one thing you have to wrap your head around. The grammar aspect of verbs and the verbs themselves are kind of the same thing. With です, the grammar was separate from the vocab. You’d attach the vocab to the です to make it mean something. With verbs, the vocab and the grammar are one and the same. For example:
たべます = to eat
The blue part, たべ, is technically the part that tells you what the word is. The red part, ます, is the grammar part. The ます part tells us that this verb is in future tense (to eat) and not past tense or something else (if it was past tense, this word would be read たべました).
In this chapter, we will be learning ます form, as well as some verb vocabulary to go with it. By learning a bunch of verb vocabulary in ます form, you’ll basically already know all the same verb vocabulary in past, negative, and past negative forms as well (plus a whole bunch of other things). All you have to learn is the new ender (i.e. replace ます with something else). In order to be able to do that, though, you have to put the extra work in to learn the vocabulary themselves. That’s the hard part, though we’ll try to make it as easy as possible on you.
Here’s a list for Anki that you can use. Import it to your TextFugu Vocab deck and get started on it – there’ll be more to learn next chapter as well, so you ought to get as much out of the way as you can now.
Verbs 1 (Formal) on Anki
Tips for learning long lists of abstract vocab you don’t know anything about:
- Before every “session,” try to cram 2-3 words and pseudo-learn them. This won’t put the words into your long term memory, sure, but as soon as they come up in Anki, you’ll have to recall them out of your short term memory, which really helps you to learn them. So, even though you don’t really know the 2-3 words when you crammed them, you probably do know them after they show up in your list once or twice (and better than all your other words, at that).
- Take in these words in small groups. Studying 5-10 at a time is plenty, and mix in old words too (Anki does this for you, in fact). The key is to not overwhelm yourself with words. Lots of smaller, spaced out study sessions is way better than one big study session with too many words in it.
- Space out your study times. Study these words for 10-15 minutes at a time, take a break for 10-15 minutes to do something else, and then come back. You’ll find yourself learning a lot more a lot faster this way, since you’re giving your brain a bit of time to process information.
- Don’t give up! This one is obvious, but hard to follow. It’s hard learning lots of words, and it’s not always fun. Still, it’s a really important part of learning Japanese, and very necessary! If you give up on them, it’ll just take you longer, so get it all out of the way and persevere!
In order to help you out with everything, as well, I’ve created a PDF with the list of verbs you’ll be learning. Try to use this more as a reference (rather than a cheat sheet). You should try to learn all these verbs before getting to all the verb exercises and such (in a few pages from now), and use this PDF to help yourself to learn them (tick off the ones you know, don’t know, etc., so you know what to focus on). You can even use this list to do that “cramming technique” mentioned earlier in this page.
You don’t have to go through all of the words in this list before moving on, though get through what you can. We’ll be learning some particles on the next page, so you can use that to take a break from studying your verbs list if you need to. Just make sure you keep studying this list, and study it a lot. It’ll be really important really soon!