Let's try Verb Suffix Search

Verb Suffix Search Overview

With Word Search, it is possible to look up the conjugations of words, but it does not cover all of the phrases that may follow a word. For instance, if you want to look up the accent for word "歌ったり", it is possible to get the "~ta" form of the verb, "歌った", with word search but it is not possible to know what form the accent will take with "ri" suffixing this. As in this case, when you would like to know the accent at the sentence level, it is necessary to consider not only the word in question but the word suffixing it as well. However, the number of possible words that can follow it are limitless and thus it is impossible to cover all of them. On this page, a number of words that appear in "練習" of "初級日本語" by Tokyo University of Foreign Studies are shown. For instance, if you input "歌ったり", a variety of suffixes are given along with their accents for "歌う". Among them, "歌ったり" is shown in the center of the screen in a red box. Moreover, if you set "Pitch Contour" to "Show", it is possible to view the pitch contour for that item.

To carry out the below, open the page "Suffix Search".

We recommend that you open up the page "Suffix Search" in another window and keep this "Let's try.." page open in this window while carrying out the tasks below.

Exercises

1. In the box for Verb Expression, enter "教えたりしなければならない".
2. Click "Search". Set Pitch Contour to "Show" and "Columns to Show" to "Show verbs from same group".
3. To the far left of the three columns, the list of suffix words and their accents are displayed for the word "教える". "教えたりしなければならない" is enclosed in a red box. The pitch contour is also visible.
4. With Columns to Show, "Show verbs from same group" was selected so two columns are displayed on the left. These are "教える" and type 0 and accented words of group 2. Since "教える" is a type 0 word, comparing the representative word of type 0, "開けたりしなければならない", it can be seen that for both the accent is on "ta". For the representative accented verb "閉めたりしなければならない" it can be seen that the position of the accent is quite different from type 0.
5. Next, for Verb Expressions, enter "教えたはずなのに".
6. Click "Search"
7. As with "教える" the suffix word list is shown, and the word "教えたはずだ" is shown enclosed in a pink box. Pink means that an exact match was not found. Thus, the closest match to "教えたはずなのに", "教えたはずだ" is displayed instead.

Request

As previously mentioned, it is not feasible to cover all suffixes so we have included them to the best of our ability. That being said, we would like to increase the number of suffixes so learners do not experience dissatisfaction with the search results. We would like you to contact us at "OJAD Development Team" if there are any suffixes that you view as necessary.

Let's try Word Search　 Let's try Suzuki-kun　 Return to the top page