008: Sitting Down

Today we learn a something epic and huge. That is verbs. Verbs are the most important part of the Japanese sentence alongside the predicate. That is because everything in the Japanese sentence is organized around whatever is at the and of the sentence. Which in Japanese is the predicate or a verb. Verb in Japanese can be kind tricky. So in order to appropriately understand them and not get unnecessarily confused, we will first discuss the three different types of verbs before we talk about conjugation and all the other things that verbs do.

In Japanese there are three types of verbs. Ichidan, Godan (also called Yodan) and exception verbs. Unlike many other languages, Japanese does not have many exception verbs, which makes things really nice. It's important to understand that the three unique verb types now so we can learn how to conjugate them later. 

While some grammarians and old-time teachers will often over complicate this the easiest way to differentiate the two types is to spell the verbs out in romanized letters (IE; ABC.) All Ichidan verbs are verbs that end in "ERU" or "IRU" it is that simple. All other verbs are Godan verbs. Period. 

Look at the verbs below and identify which are Ichidan verbs and Which are Godan verbs. The answers will be listed under the last frame of the comic.