As a studies of Japanese I've come across two distinct ways to group verbs for purposes of remembering how to conjugate them.
う動詞 / る動詞
Group1 / Group 2
Pacerier mentioned a verb1 and verb5, can someone explain to me how the verbs are divided for this system?
Also, how do Japanese people learn the different conjugations patterns? What system for verb classification do they use?
this question may boarder on off-topic, but i think as a Japanese learner, I'd like to be able to ask verb related questions to a Japanese person, but if i say う動詞, unless they are familiar with non-foreigners learning Japanese, they don't know what I'm talking about.
Answer
The two types are:
[五段動詞]{ご・だん・どう・し} ー means "5-level verbs". This is the group where the conjugations match the 5 vowel sounds of their respective kana ending. A common 五段動詞 is 書く. It conjugates along the k- column of the hiragana table:
書かない 書きます 書く 書けば／書ける 書こう
We can see that its conjugations hit all 5 of the k-kana: か き く け こ
Note that 五段動詞 that end in 〜う (like 会う) have a conjugation of わ い う え お (会わない for the negative). This is not arbitrary, and there are historical reasons for this, but I will not attempt to get into them here.
The other type are the [一段動詞]{いち・だん・どう・し} (your るverbs). However, these can be broken down based on (I believe) the last character of their "base form" (the part before the る). The kana columns go -a -i -u -e -o, where the -u is considered the "center". They are classified as "upper" ([上]{かみ}) or "lower" ([下]{しも}) based on the center.
- 着る is 上一段 since き is one level "above" the center (which would be く)
- 食べる is 下一段 since べ is one level "under" the center (which would be ぶ)
There are such things as 上二段 and 下二段 verbs, but I don't think they exist in modern spoken Japanese. At least that's what 広辞苑 implies.
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