A type of
Japanese verb. Most
verbs in
Japanese are Godan
verbs, as opposed to
Ichidan verbs.
Godan means "
consonant-
stem".
Godan verbs end in any consonant plus u. The following are some Godan verbs:
That last verb,
kau, is considered to end in
-wu, even though it doesn't. The
derivation behind this is pretty
complex and more resembles a
mathematical proof than any useful
grammatical discussion, so I'm leaving it out. However, you will notice that
verbs like
kau generally behave as if they did end in
-wu for the purposes of forming
bases and
changing form.
Note that some verbs ending in -ru will look like Ichidan verbs, but are actually Godan. Examples include kaeru, shiru, or kiru. To make matters worse, there are both Ichidan and Godan versions of a few verbs. Kaeru (return) is Godan, whereas kaeru (change) is Ichidan.
To form bases from Godan verbs, you basically change the vowel of the last syllable of the verb to...
- a
- i
- u
- e
- oo
- tte / ide / ite / shite / nde
- tta / ita / shita / nda
But this isn't a good way to describe it, because Godan verbs vary considerably in their
phonology, which
must be taken into account. This produces so many "
exceptions" that the above list really isn't very useful for actually working with the words. Check the
individual bases (
Base 1 -
Base 7) for more
conjugation information.