Ta-Form
“Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” - Albert Einstein
Technically we’re learning “past tense casual verb form” but to make it easier, let’s call it た-form. Think of it this way – you want to say good bye to someone who’s leaving? What could you say? How about “ta ta my darling!” That person was here, now they’re not. They’re past tense.
Anyways, you’re learning た-form which is past tense dictionary form (casual, remember!), and we’ll try to call it that from now on to avoid any confusion.
Now, why in the world would you call past tense dictionary verbs “た-form” verbs? It’s just like い-adjectives and な-adjectives in how they end with い or な. With た-form, as I’m sure you can guess, it ends with a た.
Now, this whole lesson is broken up into a few different parts. We have to look at the different verb “Groups” (remember Verb Group 1, Group 2, Group Exceptions?) because they all have slightly different rules. As long as you remember how to figure out the groups (for the most part, at least) it should be a simple step to learn た-form – you’ll just need to memorize a couple of rules and then you should be good to go. It’ll definitely take a lot of practice and experience (which I’ll try to give you as much as possible!) to get really comfortable with た-form, but the goal for this lesson is to get you to the point where you can look at a verb and then turn it into た-form, even if it takes a few seconds of thinking per word. That’s okay. It’s going to get easier with time and practice.