3.1. REVISITS AND SIMPLE INFLECTIONS 89
adjectives inflect to show tense, rather than :
adjective polite present polite past
rule stem + + past tense +
+ +
+ +
+ +
+ +A note of caution: many beginning students of Japanese make the
mistake of forgeĴing that verbal adjectives are verbal, and are themselves
inflected, rather than using for tense. One of the first mistakes (and
arguably one of the biggest) made by beginning students is saying some-
thing such as:
To mean ”it was fun”. Try, very hard, not to make this mistake.
Remember for verbal adjectives ”inflect first, then add for politeness”,
not ”add first, then inflect”.
3.1.2 AĴributive
When something is aĴributive, it means that it is essentially doing what an
adjective does: it aĴributes some quality to a noun. Verbs, verbal adjectives
and nouns can all do this, but they do so in different ways.
For verbs and verbal adjectives, the is aĴributive by its very
definition (it is the ”aĴributive” base). For verbal adjectives this seems
fairly obvious, but for verbs, things are no different:
”(he/she/it) is (a/the) good person.””(he/she/it)’s (a/the) coffee drinking person.”For nouns, things are a liĴle trickier. There are two classes of nouns,
namely the ones we already saw in the previous chapter, linking up using