How to Conjugate い Adjectives

“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.” - Albert Einstein

A quick review on conjugation.

When it comes to noun (and なadj) conjugation, you use:

です　present/future
でした　past
じゃありません　negative
じゃありませんでした　past negative

For formal/polite verbs, you use:

〜ます　present/future
〜ました　past
〜ません　negative
〜ませんでした　past negative

With い adjectives, however, you have to learn a new way of conjugating them:

〜い　present/future
〜かった　past
〜くない　negative
〜くなかった　past negative

Those are the conjugations, but what do they mean? Here’s how conjugations with い adjectives work:

First, you start with an い adjective (duh). The important part is the い on the end.

あたらしい

Then, depending on what you want to say, you’ll need to change that い (or leave it the same) to whatever tense you want to change it to.

あたらしい

あたらしかった

あたらしくない

あたらしくなかった

One thing to note is that even if you end the sentence with one of these conjugations, you will still want to add です onto it (even though it’s technically present/future form!) to make it neutral/polite. You’ll learn how to make things more casual in Season 5 (that’s soon!), but for now, we’re sticking with polite form. So the above words would be…

audio.mp3あたらしいです
It is new.

audio.mp3あたらしかったです
It was new.

audio.mp3あたらしくないです
It is not new.

audio.mp3あたらしくなかったです
It was not new.

There’s quite a bit of information on this page, but there are only two things that you need to take away from here before moving on to the next page. They are:

1. The い part of the い adjective is what changes (when conjugating)
2. You’ll want to add です to these to make them polite, even if the adjective is past tense, negative, or past negative. As in, you do not write あたらしかったでした – it’s あたらしかったです.

If you know those two things, you’ll be good. We’ll be tackling each conjugation one by one, so you’ll learn each one at a time.

← 後 前 →