I’ve been diving deeper into grammar recently to help with my reading practice, and I was wondering if doing verb conjugation drills would be counterproductive. A lot of people say that conjugations will come naturally through immersion, but after reading a post on the topic, I’m reconsidering. In the post, the author mentioned that they created a list of verbs, including all possible conjugation forms for each, and drilled them as a way to have a solid reference point. This method helped them avoid having to learn conjugations for every individual verb they encounter. What are your thoughts on this approach?
Also if anyone can reach out to me I have some questions about particles but I didn’t feel like writing all that on here.
by Repulsive_Fortune_25
4 comments
I don’t think there is anything wrong with it, this site is good
[https://wkdonc.github.io/conjugation/drill.html](https://wkdonc.github.io/conjugation/drill.html)
Drilling verb conjugations is very common when learning other languages such as French and Spanish. I’ve have been drilling Japanese verbs and find it much easier to read and listen now.
We used to do this in high school for learning Spanish so I’d been wondering if it’d be useful for Japanese as well too
Well there are different parts of this.
1) remembering the verbs themselves, and especially remembering whether verbs ending in る are godan or ichidan
2) remembering how the conjugation rules / system itself and being able to apply it
In my experience, they go hand in hand and the more you use the language, especially writing and speaking your own sentences, the more natural it becomes. Basically just using the language makes you constantly remembering verbs and you constantly practise verb conjugations, and you will be faster and faster at doing it, so when you see a verb that ends in む you kinda instantly knows it becomes んで and so on.
So I mean… yeah, do practise conjugating verbs and remembering new verbs, but I would say drilling them except for a few very basic ones are a waste of time since it’s already integrated in almost all ways of learning the language. Basically you cannot avoid doing it, except for maybe the less often used conjugations. But it’s always nice to have a reference verb. For example, sometimes in the beginning, I would forget how to conjugate verbs ending in む, but then I could just think of another basic verb ending in it such as 読む and I would remember it. It’s more like a nice associative memory trick.