Verb Negatives - U

Verb Negatives - U

Negative meaning of the verb

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to form the past tense (過去形(かこけい)) of Japanese verbs to talk about actions or states that have already happened.

An introduction to Japanese verb conjugation

One of the best ways to make verb "conjugation" easier is by understanding the system as a whole. As a reminder, verb conjugation is the process of changing verb forms to convey extra information. In English, this typically involves adding letters, e.g. to form the past tense you often add "ed" to the end of a verb.

Japanese doesn't adhere to traditional conjugations; instead, it functions as more of an agglutinative language. As the name suggests, this involves "gluing" many different isolated pieces together to form a new word.

This means that, so long as you know the core, also called the stem, you can simply change out the same "pieces" as needed. As we will see, this mostly comes into play with u-verbs, since ru-verbs don't have different stems — you simply replace the る with whatever element you want.

To review, u-verbs end in a u sound, which means they have the following endings, marked in blue in the table below. Here is an example verb:

If we now change our last kana く, from the u-column to the a-column, we get a new verb stem and can attach different auxiliaries, or helper verbs, to express specific meanings. For example, if we attach the auxiliary adjective ない​, we can express the negative.

All other conjugations in Japanese function in a similar way. For every column you have a set of auxiliaries, or helper verbs, that you can attach to it to form a specific meaning.

In the interest of simplicity, we will refer to these stem columns as the a-stem, i-stem, e-stem and o-stem, respectively.

The following are the rules for constructing negative u-verbs.

For u-verbs that end in う like 買(か)う​ buy, turn the う into わ and add ない​ and you get 買(か)わない​ not buy. This is the only exception you need to remember.

For all other u-verbs, turn the last u vowel into the equivalent a vowel and add ない​.

Let's take a look at some examples that use the negative form of a verb in a sentence.

Formation