casual verbs...

[akuma-chan]

i just learned that instead of saying arimasu you can say aru, and instead of imasu you can say iru. i'm wondering if you can follow that form for all verbs? so like instead of tabemasu it's taru? help please!

[Infidel]

aru and iru are the plain form and yes you can use the plain form with all verbs depending on the situation; although, the plain form of tabemasu is taberu

[nprz]

It is tricking to deduce a formula from 2 verbs which conjugate in different ways. arimasu is a v5 verb, while imasu is a v1 verb. one conjugates by aru->arimasu by changing the ru to ri and adding masu, while the other iru->imasu drops the ru and adds masu.

[akuma-chan]

ok so how do you know which "v" the verbs are? is there any rule to firgure that out?

[InsanityRanch]

acidrain8 wrote:
ok so how do you know which "v" the verbs are? is there any rule to firgure that out?

Yes there is... but it won't help much at the beginning.

First, all v1 verbs end in -iru or -eru. So you can see immediately that a verb like kaku (to write) is a v5.

However, not all verbs that end in -iru or -eru are v1. Taberu (to eat) is v1. Kaeru (to return, to go home) is v5. To make matters worse, there are a number of verbs pronounced "kaeru" but spelled with various kanji. (Like English homonyms.) Some are v1 verbs and some are v5. In fact, Japanese has LOTS of homonyms, including many, many verbs with the same pronunciation and different meanings.

If you see a verb written in kanji + okurigana or grammar kana, you can usually tell if it is v1 or v5. But at this point you probably don't read kanji, so that won't help.

Your best strategy as a beginner is to learn the common verbs that end in 'iru' or 'eru' but are actually v5 verbs. Then you will know that other -eru/-iru verbs you encounter are almost certainly v1.

Is there a list of common -eru/iru v5 verbs around here somewhere? Like kaeru, hairu...

Shira

Shira