An introduction to Japanese - Syntax, Grammar & Language

60 CHAPTER 2. VERB GRAMMAR

Recycling our example sentence from the present tense section, we

get the following sentences:

Today (I) don’t/won’t walk.

(I) don’t/wont’ watch TV.

This isn’t expensive.

However, please note that this rule does not apply to the special
verb , which we shall treat in the next section. Rather than becoming
, it is simply replaced with.
(On a final note, it is imperative this should never be confused
with another adjective pronounced , , as it means ”deceased”)

2.1.3 Basic inflections for irregular verbs and verbal adjec-

tives

There are three irregular verbs in Japanese that we need to look at be-

fore moving on to further inflections, being , ”do”/”decide on”,

,

”come” and , ”exist” (forinanimatethings).

The irregular verb

Looking at first, we see the following bases and inflection table

base form

, ,

( ), ( ),

affirmative negative

plain ” ” + :

We see that actually has three different forms, as well as

three different forms - which of these gets used is fully determined