Chapter 2

Verb grammar

As was mentioned in the introduction, there are two classes of verbal words
in Japanese:verbs, andverbal adjectives. Both of these can be considered

to consist of two parts: a verbalstem, called the ”gokan” (
), which
indicates what the core meaning of a verb or verbal adjective is, and some

additional hiragana called ”okurigana” (
), which is used to indi-
cate inflection.
Unlike English, where verb stems are already usable on their own

• the verb stem of ”walk” is ”walk”, for instance – verb stems in Japanese
  require an inflection indicator in the form of okurigana, so before we move
  on to the actual rules of grammar concerning Japanese verbs and verbal
  adjectives, we must look at how verbs and verbal adjectives are composed
  in Japanese. We will first be deconstructing the verbs, after which we’ll
  deconstruct the verbal adjectives.

2.1 Inflecting

In English, we are used to thinking of verb inflections in terms of ’the verb’
plus some text that indicates the inflection. We consider ”walked” to con-
sist of ”walk” with ”-ed” tacked on the end, and ”passing” as being ”pass”
with ”-ing” added to it. However, many verb forms in English actually use
helper verbs, so things like ”will help”, ”let’s dance”, ”be able to dive” are
considered verb chains, with the helper verb(s) indicating the tense, mood
and aspect.
In Japanese, all verb inflections are in fact chains of helper verbs and
verbal adjectives, but rather than being a long list of separated verbs like
in English, they are added to the base verb one by one until all the tenses,

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