Conjugation and Tense
You should have looked at all the other material in the beginner lessons by now. If not, you should go do that now. This page is meant to serve as a brief overview of beginner Japanese tenses.
Its a lot of information to cover in one article, so I’ve broken it into the Verb Conjugations and Adjective Conjugation pages. Here, we’re just going to cover some basic terminology and define the tenses.
Conjugation
Japanese tenses are created through conjugation of a verb or adjective.
Conjugating a verb or adjective means changing its sound to change its meaning or tense.
This is generally done by changing the last few sounds of a verb or adjective.
You can change the tense of Nouns and Na adjectives by changing the tense of だ・です
Tenses
Dictionary – How a verb appears in a dictionary. Combined present and future tense. (Is + will be)
Negative – This is the negative version of the dictionary form. It is both negative present and negative future. It means is not/will not/don’t.
Past – Basic past tense, but is also completion tense “Has been done”.
Negative Past – Negative of the past tense.
Forms
Additionally, there are some forms separate from tense that you will learn more about later.
The most important ones are:
Polite Form – ます/です
Plain/Simple Form – Non polite form.
Additional Verb Forms
Additional verb forms (not true tenses) exist, but they are a little above the level of an introduction, and require a little more depth to talk about. Please check their corresponding pages for more information. Here are some of the pages: