Japanese Verb Forms

By Eriko Sato

Part of the Japanese For Dummies Cheat Sheet

To understand any language, including Japanese, you need to know verbs — the words that convey action. And just as English verbs have a few eccentricities, it pays to keep a few facts in mind when you’re dealing with Japanese verbs:

Present and future tenses use the same verb form, so taberu means “I eat” and “I will eat.”
You don’t conjugate according to person. It doesn’t matter who’s eating — you use taberu for Ieat, you eat, he or she eats, we eat, and they eat.
Use the stem form if you’re adding a suffix to show politeness or another condition.
Use the te-form if you are adding another verb or an auxiliary verb to the main verb.

In Japanese, you don’t conjugate verbs according to person, but you use different forms for present and past tenses, for affirmative and negative statements, for formal and informal speech, and to convey respect. The following table shows the various forms of taberu, to eat:

--	Present Affirmative	Present Negative	Past Affirmative	Past Negative	Stem Form	Te-form
Informal	taberu	tabenai	tabeta	tabenakatta	tabe	tabete
Formal	tabe-masu	tabe-masen	tabe-mashita	tabe-masendeshita