Understanding Inflections and Conjugations
Kanshudo's tools for understanding and learning inflections and conjugations
Kanshudo includes several sophisticated tools to help you understand and use inflections and verb conjugations. See below to get started!
Tip: look for the inflections icon
- anywhere you see it,
there will be a link to click for more detail.
Anywhere you see a word summary bar in Kanshudo (with the word in a green box, and the meaning next to it),
click on the word (the green box) for more details. In the quick summary view that appears, you'll see a link labelled
INFLECTIONS. Clicking that will show you a table with the most common inflections of that word, and at the bottom of the table will be another link labelled ALL INFLECTIONS, which will take you to a page with more detail.
Try it now with this word:
noun, 'suru' verb
1. study2. diligence
(click the word to view an additional 1 meaning, examples and links)
One of the hardest challenges in Japanese is understanding how a word is formed by combining several inflections. Kanshudo makes this easy: just search for the inflected word in Quick Search. Kanshudo Search will 'deinflect' any words it thinks might be inflected, and will display dictionary forms of words that could potentially be the basis of the word you are looking for.
Whenever possible, Kanshudo will also try to identify how a dictionary form could be inflected to match your search term. For example, try the following searches:
Quick Search will also include any example sentences which include your search term (or you can search for example sentences only in Example Search).
This will enable you to gain a deeper insight into the meaning of your word by seeing it in context.
For example, consider this sentence:
The details page (which you can reach by clicking the DETAILS link) shows
how the complex word 連れてきてもらえて actually combines four different forms like this:
連れてきてもらえて is the te form of the potential form of the てもらう form of the てくる form of ichidan verb 連れる
ALL INFLECTIONS
Each form used is linked to an article in the
Grammar Library so you can learn how it works in detail.
Kanshudo's Inflection Showcase provides a very quick and easy way to generate either basic or complex inflections for all common parts of speech. Use it to track down a specific conjugation, or see the difference between the same inflection for different verb forms. Below each list of inflections is a link to run a special word search which will show you all Japanese words tagged as the part of speech you have selected - a great way to find similar words.
Kanshudo is your AI Japanese tutor, and your constant companion on the road to mastery of the Japanese language.
To get started learning Japanese, just follow the study recommendations on your Dashboard.
You can use Quick search (accessible using the icon at the top of every page) to look up any Japanese word, kanji or grammar point, as well as to find anything on Kanshudo quickly.
For an overview, take the tour.