Short form anguish 2

[Spiderwick]

Sorry to mither you all again about the short form of verbs, but I'm really having a bit of trouble with them in terms of the past tense My question is, do I have to transform the dictionary form into its te form and from there go the short form? Some of them seem to work this way. After I add the correct te form I then take off the te and add なかった. All was going well when I checked my answers and I found verbs such as もらう　became 　もらさった (past affirmative - but works when I take off the te form) もらわなかった (past negative - doesn't work).

My book did mention about converting to the te, but a number of verbs don't follow the expected pattern. Can anyone tell me if I am completely wrong? I don't remember going though this procedure for the present tense of the short form

After a hard day at work my mind has completely given up on me now. Any help would be much appreciated,

Anne

[Javizy]

You can think in terms of the て-form for plain affirmative past:

もらう > もらって > もらった
あるく > あるいて > あるいた

For the negative past, you first conjugate to the plain negative as usual:

もらわない
あるかない

Then you just conjugate ない like any other i-adjective, so it becomes なかった:

もらわなかった
あるかなかった

Check this site if you want more details.

[QuackingShoe]

Yes, I really encourage you to read through all of the basic sections of the site Javizy linked as opposed to whatever you're going through right now, or at least in addition to it. You seem to be having a lot of confusion because of the way they focused on the polite form first instead of the plain form (also calling it the 'short' form, apparently), and the order they're introducing other elements, which are problems that you just shouldn't have if you followed a more logical approach like the one found on that site.

Japanese textbooks have a rather long history by this point of teaching verb conjugations in about the least efficient way possible, unfortunately.

[Spiderwick]

Thank you so much for your help. I suppose doing self-study means that you just never know when a textbook's approach is not always helpful in progressing my Japanese. I hadn't realised about he plain and polite form! This was mentioned in my book. Perhaps that's why when I tried to look up the answers in my grammar book, I could never find the 'short form' there. Again, thank you so much for your help - both in terms of the explanation and the web link. A happier bunny tonight,
Anne

[Taurus]

Just as a matter of interest, what book are you using?

My own recommendation would be Minna no Nihongo to start with.