Doing Too Much
“Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.” - Albert Einstein
Now that you know すぎる, let’s learn how to attach it to something. Right now, we’re going to just look at verbs (as in, eat too much, watch too much, run too much, etc). On the next page, though, we’ll look at adjectives (as in, too tall, too expensive, too funny, etc).
The pattern for this is very simple:
dict.stem + すぎる
______ too much
The stem form, I’m sure you remember, is the verb minus the ます.
たべます → たべ
いきます → いき
さわります → さわり
So, if we were to change these to すぎる form, how would we do it?
aいきすぎる (go too much)
aたべすぎる (eat too much)
aさわりすぎる (touch too much)
That’s the most basic version of this, and what we’re going to hold on for now. I want you to practice converting verbs to すぎる for just a bit before moving on to adjectives, which is very similar. Once you learn adjectives+すぎる, we’ll practice them both with regular sentences, and then expand to slightly more complicated things from there.