Doing Something (Verbs Part 2)
“I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.” - Abraham Lincoln
In the last chapter, you learned the most basic ways to use verbs in Japanese. すしをたべます… にほんごをならいます… アメリカにいきます… etc. You can make basic verbs, that’s great. Now it’s time to make verbs about four times as useful by introducing various tenses that you can use.
Before you move on, I want to make sure you’ve done a few things. First, make sure you know the verb vocab from the last chapter. Also, make sure that you keep studying and reviewing vocab words from the kanji you’re learning (and don’t forget to review your kanji as well). As a beginner, it’s hard to keep on top of your kanji study and memory, since you don’t have as much opportunity to use it all. Just make sure you’re consistently drilling it until they become second nature (it should take a while, don’t worry if it doesn’t happen all at once, it won’t!).
Once you make sure of those two things, move on to the next page, where you’ll start learning another set of verbs. Combine this set of verbs with the previous set of verbs, and you have yourself the most useful, common Japanese verbs out there. 95% of the time you use a verb in Japanese, it will be one of these. The other 5% consists of the hundreds… perhaps thousands of verbs you don’t know yet. But, like I said, they aren’t as useful and common, and we’re all about high impact studying. Spending 20-30 hours learning that last five percent could be better spent learning so many other things. Lets leave that for later.