One of the nice things about Japanese compared with other languages I've studied (English, Spanish, and Latin) is that the verbs have no number or person. There's none of that "I am; you (singular) are; he, she, it is; we are, you (plural) are, they are" that makes European languages such a pain for new students.
In Japanese, three things are distinguished by inflection (changing the form of the word): tense, affirmation/negation, and politeness level. English verbs form their negatives irregularly by appending one or more words. "I eat. I do not eat. It eats. It does not eat. I ate. I did not eat. I will eat. I will not eat/I won't eat." (Yikes! It's a good thing I already know English because I'd never be able to learn it.)
English verbs do not change form based on level of politeness. English has politeness levels, but they are expressed less systematically with word choice and (when speaking) with tone and enunciation. Politeness levels are not built into the forms of the words themselves.
Students of Japanese are taught the formal forms of verbs first. This is fine for the casual traveller. But now that I'm starting my second semester of Japanese and the informal non-past and past tenses are being taught, I wish I had learned them first. You see, there's a system. (I love systems.) And it's beautiful in its regularity. It's only taken a day to learn the informal affirmative and negative tenses of all the verbs I already knew. Try doing that in English, Spanish, or Latin!
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
January 16, 2003
Share Your Thoughts
in flec tion the change of form that words undergo to mark such distinctions as case, gender, number, tense, person, mood, or voice.