Conjugations
How to Use Conjugations ・ How to Get Conjugations
Conjugations is a pretty simple idea. It's a conjugation guide for Japanese verbs. Simply enter any verb to search Conjugations, or select any verb in Edict (or almost any in Waeijiro or other dictionaries) and jump to Conjugations to see how to conjugate it. Want to find the causative form of "あそぶ"? No problem.
The new (April `10) version of
Conjugations
You can see some of
the features of the
new version of Conjugations here. First, the layout makes it much
easier to read and understand than before. Second, there's more
information. Tap the name of a tense and you'll automatically jump to a
brief
explanation of that tense (then just tap the back arrow to get back to this
screen). I, F, +, and - are for Informal, Formal,
Positive, and
Negative--that's pretty easy to remember, but if you
forget, just tap
that code and you'll jump to an explanation.
How to Use Conjugations
You can look up a verb
or jump from a verb in Edict or another dictionary (here's how to jump in EB
Pocket on Windows
Mobile, as in the JLT Complete System). You can enter a word either in
kanji and hiragana or all in hiragana (e.g., for the search shown
above, you can enter 遊ぶ or あそぶ), and you can use all the normal input
tools your OS and program allow (see here for the different ways to enter text in the JLT Complete System). You can also enter the conjugated form of any very you see; let's say I see the word "あそばない" and I don't know what verb it is or what tense it is. When I search for it Conjugations, I get the result below:
Tap or click image to see
full-resolution version
Notice that the result
for the term I
searched for, あそぶない, is right at the top of the results screen--the
heading showing the tense is somewhere above the screen, out of sight.
This
is due to how the dictionary program works, but it's no problem. Simply
tap or click the open triangle icon to jump up a bit and display that heading, as
you can see below.
Tap or click image to see
full-resolution version
You can tap
the solid triangle to jump up to the first line of the entire
entry for the verb, as shown below.
Tap or click image to see
full-resolution version
From here, you can tap
the
back arrow to go back to where you started. A few more hints about Conjugations and EBPocket:
- You'll notice that the EB Pocket
screen shown above is divided into two parts, a top part showing a
list of all results that match the search term (often in Conjugations
there'll be only one result) and a bottom part showing the full entry
for the result chosen from the top. But in the image
at the top of this
page,
the full-results section takes up the whole screen. To toggle between
these two modes, simply tap the Full Screen icon
.
As
always in EB Pocket, tap the
back arrow to come
back. In the bottom section, you can scroll up or down in the
dictionary with the slider on the right--when you reach the end of its
range, simply tap the up or down arrow above or below the slider to
move to the next range (sometimes you have to tap twice).
These are all features of the dictionary program EB Pocket
(Windows Mobile version) used in the JLT Complete System, not of the
dictionary itself; other programs may work a little differently but
should offer the same functions.
- You can make
a verb out of just about any noun by sticking "suru" on the end (the
most common ones are indicated by the grammar code "vs" in Edict).
Conjugations does NOT list these separately, as only the "suru" part is
conjugated and it's conjugated the same way in every case. Indeed, many
people consider these to be nouns followed by the verb "suru" rather
than as verbs in and of themselves--that makes sense to me. So if you
see something with the "vs" code in Edict and want to see how to
conjugate it, simply jump from the "vs" verb code in Edict to
Conjugations (or look up "する" in Conjugations) and tack the
appropriate form onto the end of your noun. If you're having a hard
time finding a conjugated form in Conjugations, consider that it might
be a noun followed by a conjugated form of "suru" rather than a
discrete verb (this is especially likely to be true where you've got a
kanji or two or three followed be a mess of hiranaga beginning with "さ"
or "し"): look up the kanji or the first part in Edict, and/or look up
the part that looks like a conjugation ending in Conjugations--instead
of being a conjugation ending, it may be the entire conjugated from of
"suru."
- You can change the font sizes from the Options in the Tool
menu of EB Pocket (again, if you're using a different program, there
should still be a way to change the font size).
- The term you searched for will appear in red type everywhere it's found. You can jump to the nearest instance of the search term by tapping the magnifiying glass icon .
- One oddity: in EBPocket, when a line wraps such that the basic tense code (I+, F+, I-, F-) appears the very left of the screen (and only when the I or F itself is the first character on the line), the links seem to shift one space to the right. That is, when you tap the code (I+, F+, I-, F-), you jump to the explanation of the codes. But when you tap the open triangle, you also jump to the code explanation, not to the tense heading where the open triangle normally leads. Tap the solid triangle, and you'll jump to the tense heading where the open triangle normally leads, not to to the top heading of the word. The solution is simple: when that happens, just use the back arrow to get back to where you were, then tap one space to the right of where you would normally: if you want to tap the open triangle, instead tap the solid one; if you want to tap the solid triangle, instead tap the empty space just to the right of it. This seems to be a bug in EBPocket, but fortunately it's quite easy to work around.
How to Get Conjugations
Conjugations is included standard in the Complete System. You can also purchase it as part of the JLT package, along with the JLT version of Eijiro.