Nikui
“It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.” - Winston Churchill
While you’re studying the vocab, you’re going to start with the first grammar concept. As I mentioned on page one, you’ll be using verbs, and you’ll be using stem form.
Let’s get to stem form, first.
1. Take your verb (let’s use たべます)
2. Remove the ます from it (たべ) to make it stem form
Just to practice, make sure you can make the following verbs stem form as well:
いきます
いき
およぎます
およぎ
はなします
はなし
のみます
のみ
Pretty easy so far, right? Here’s the pattern for the grammar you’ll be learning right now.
v.stem + にくい + です
So, if we just purely take the pattern above, and apply it to the verb たべます, we’d get:
たべ ＋ にくい ＋ です
たべにくいです
Difficult to eat
When you add にくい to the stem form of a verb, it makes it mean “hard to do _______.” This only works with verbs (so you can’t stick it on an adjective and say something like “it’s hard to be tall”), which means this grammar point is very specific. That’s good because it makes it much easier to learn, though you won’t have as much flexibility as you may be used to with a lot of the other grammar points. Let’s try converting some verbs to にくい (hard to do) form. I’ll do the first one for you, see if you can do the rest.
のみます → のみにくいです (hard to drink)
すわります
すわりにくいです (hard to sit)
たちます
たちにくいです (hard to stand)
かいます
かいにくいです (hard to buy)
しんじます
しんじにくいです (hard to believe)
わらいます
わらいにくいです (hard to laugh)
Make sure you can convert those verbs over to にくい form. If you need additional practice, just take a look at either verbs list and continue practicing with those. The にくい pattern is pretty easy (as long as you remember the にくい part) so I don’t imagine it will give you too much trouble, but it doesn’t hurt to practice (which we’ll keep doing anyways).