Postby Jason » May 6th, 2006 10:10 pm
Ok, first we need to get some terms straight. All Japanese verbs convey 3 basic meanings: tense, affirmation/negation, and politeness level.
"Tense" refers ONLY to when the action takes place. In Japanese there are only 2 tenses*: past and non-past. Things like actions taking place continually over a period of time ("I studied Japanese for 3 years") are expressed with other constructions (namely, the ている form), but those are not considered different tenses, though you may hear them called the "progressive tense."
"Affirmation/negation" is self-explanitory.
Most people will probably initially tell you there are 2 politeness levels in Japanese, but there's actually 4: plain, standard polite (what the beginner lessons here use), humble, and honorific. The last 2 only come up when you study keigo, or respectful language that goes beyond standard polite form.
A verb always expresses some combination of these 3 basic meanings. Ex) Non-past/affirm/plain, past/neg/polite, past/affirm/polite, etc.
However, in addition to these basic meanings, most verbs also have several other forms, each of which expresses these same 3 basic meanings. Let's see if I can remember them all. X is the subject, Y is the verb.
-Potential = "X is able to do Y"
-Volitional = "let's do Y". In a question "shall we/I do Y?"
-Causitive = "X is made/caused to do Y" Also "X is allowed to do Y"
-Passive = "Y was done to X"
-Causitive-Passive = "X was made/caused to do Y"
-Imperative = command
-Conditional = "If Y then..." There are actually several conditional forms.
-Te-form = doesn't really have a meaning by itself. Combined with other stuff to express different shades of meaning. Very useful.
-Conjunctive form = also doesn't have a meaning by itself. Combined with other stuff to express different shades of meanings. Also sometimes called the "masu stem" because you get it by forming the non-past/affirm/polite version of the verb, or the "masu form", and drop "masu."
Note that not all verbs can take all the forms listed above. Some just don't make sense in certain forms. More in the next part.
In addition (yes, there's more), a verb may be transitive or intransitive. Transitive means the verb takes an object. Ex) クラスを始める/KURASU o hajimeru/"I'm starting class." Intransitive means the verb cannot take an object. Ex) 日は始まる/Hi wa hajimaru/"The day began" (no one can actually start the day themselves). Intransitive verbs tend to be more limited in the forms they can take. Like 始まる/hajimaru doesn't have a potential or volitional form because that just doesn't make much sense.
What the first site lists as "Presumptive form" is really more of a sentence structure where you take the verb + the volitional form of the coppula だ/です. It's not really an independent form of the verb. But that's nitpicky.
*actually, Japanese doesn't have "tense" but "aspect." But that's a difference that probably would only confuse matters if I tried to explain it here. So we'll just call it tense for now.
Last edited by Jason on May 6th, 2006 10:27 pm, edited 4 times in total.
Jason
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