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      Base 1 + nakereba is used to make negative conditional sentences -- what will happen if something doesn't happen. Look at these examples:

      Please remember that the na in nakereba comes from nai and is the negative element. The kereba is the conditional ("if") element. Remembering this will come in handy in future studies.

Here's an easy one. Adding deshou after nai means that somebody is probably not going to do something, or that something is not likely to happen:

      Before we look at Base 1, let's quickly review the types of verbs. There are yodan, like kau, iku, matsu, and yomu; ichidan, like taberu and miru; and the two irregulars kuru and suru. If you don't remember the meanings of these please go back and review them.

      Ichidan are easy to convert into Base 1 because you just knock off the ru. In other words, their Base 1 is the same as their Base 2. The yodan group are changed so they end in a: iku changes to ika, matsu to mata, yomu to yoma, and etc. If the verb ends in u with another vowel before it, like kau, just change the u to wa; so kau becomes kawa. The irregular kuru changes to ko, and suru to shi, just like its Base 2 form.

      Below are some tables to help clarify the way the three types of verbs are converted into Bases 1 and 2 from their plain forms, which happen to be Base 3. For the sake of simplification I didn't mention it then, but all the verbs introduced in Lesson 1 were in their Base 3 forms, which, again, is their true, unconjugated root form, and how they will usually look in a dictionary. Please note the changes carefully.

        Making questions in Japanese is easy. Unlike English, where you have that silliness of subjects and verbs trading places, in Japanese all you do is stick ka on the end of a word, phrase, or sentence to turn it into a question. For example, do you remember "Ojii-san wa sugu kaerimasu" from Lesson 2? (Grandpa will return soon.) Well, just slap ka on the end and you've turned it into a question: "Ojii-san wa sugu kaerimasu ka." (Will Grandpa return soon?) Let's make questions out of some of our other previous examples:

        Did something seem amiss with the last example in Lesson 10? I hope so, because it means you noticed that while it looks like a yodan verb, it conjugated like an ichidan. It is now time to introduce the irregular verbs kuru and suru.

        We have already practiced using yodan and ichidan verbs. Besides these are the irregulars, but the good news is that there are only two: kuru, which means "to come"; and suru, which means "to do." These two have their own set of rules when it comes to conjugating, but since both are used frequently they can be mastered quickly and naturally.

Sometimes it's written masho with a line above the o, but either way this one is easy to remember. It simply means "let's (do something)." For example:

As you recall from Lesson 4, masen shows negative tense. To make that negative past tense we just add deshita. Let's change a few of the examples shown in Lesson 5:

Now that you're a little familiar with Base 2, let's try masen, which is the negative form of masu. Look at these yodan examples:

Ichidan verbs are a snap, because you change them to Base 2 by just dropping the ru at the end. Look carefully at these ichidan verbs and how they conjugate, and notice how they differ from the yodan group covered in Lesson 2: 

Plain Verb (English)	Base 2 Form	Polite Verb Form
taberu (eat)	tabe	tabemasu
oboeru (remember)	oboe	oboemasu
kimeru (decide)	kime	kimemasu
deru (leave, come out)	de	demasu
kariru (borrow)	kari	karimasu
miru (look, watch)	mi	mimasu

Plain Verb (English)	Base 2 Form	Polite Verb Form
kau (buy)	kai	kaimasu
aruku (walk)	aruki	arukimasu
isogu (hurry)	isogi	isogimasu
kasu (lend)	kashi	kashimasu
matsu (wait)	machi	machimasu
shinu (die)	shini	shinimasu
asobu (play)	asobi	asobimasu
yomu (read)	yomi	yomimasu
kaeru (return)	kaeri	kaerimasu

Please remember that all Japanese verbs end in u, but to be more precise, it's the last syllable of the plain form that ends in u. Let's take the verb aruku, which means "to walk," for example: it ends in ku, not u. Remembering this will make further study much easier.

There are 3 types of verbs in Japanese: yodan, ichidan, and irregular. First we will look at only some simple yodan verbs, which can end in u, ku, gu, su, tsu, nu, bu, mu, or ru: