Beginning Japanese for Professionals: Book 2

77 単語 Vocabulary nani ka なにか 何か something tabe ni iku たべにいく 食べにいく go to eat ikanai いかない 行かない not go See 8-4-1 tabe ni ikanai ? たべにいかない？食べにいかない Won’t you go to eat? (Invitation) wa わ sentence particle (For female speakers; male speakers, often from Osaka area, use it with FALLING tone) nnn ううん Hesitation Noise; I’m thinking famiresu ふぁみれす ファミレス family restaurant de で て form of です to iu ka というか I mean; rather (reiterating, self-correcting) ＋ te ka てか casual form of to iu ka ＋ warikan わりかん 割り勘 equal split ＋ harau はらう 払う pay ＋ okane おかね お金 money ＋ okanemochi おかねもち お金持ち rich, rich person 文法 Grammar Notes 8-4-1 Non-Past Plain Negative Forms of Verbs In 8-1-2 above, we learned how to make the non-past, affirmative plain form of verbs. We now move on to learn how to make the negative form of these verbs. Group 1: U-Verbs In order to make the negative form of a verb in this group, change the final / u / of the affirmative form to / anai /. nomimasu  nomu  nomanai ‘drink’ If there is no consonant before / u / as in kau ’buy’, drop / u / and add / wanai / . kaimasu  kau  kawanai ‘buy’ aimasu  au  awanai ‘meet’ As you remember from the kana chart, the sound / w / in Japanese can only be followed by the vowel / a /. It disappears when followed by other vowels / i, u, e , o / . So, in the stem of kaimasu , we assume that / w / is dropped before / i / and it shows up when followed by / a / in the negative form. In other words, the original forms of the verb ‘buy’ are kawimasu (formal) and kawu (plain) but they respectively become kaimasu and kau due to this phonological requirement.