verb categories, regular 1-2 vs godan ichidan vs confusion

[Alcyone]

I'm so confused.

There's too many "category" names for Japanese verbs. It's like someone said oh there's only 2 main verb groups so let's come up with 10000 names for them.

I started studying Japanese with the Japanese for Busy People book. They (or was it Sensei) called the verb groups, Regular 1, Regular 2, and Irregular. My dictionary calls them Godan and Ichidan. If I figured it out right, Regular 1 (example きく) is a Godan verb, and Regular 2 (example たべる) is an Ichidan verb. All my vocab lists are R1-R2 categorized.

Now, I'm at a new school and they use Basic Functional Japanese (a most wretched book!) and they're calling the verbs Group A (Rule 1), Group B (Rule 1), and Group C (Rule 2) and Group C has 4 different categories. The "rules" are for how you take the -masu form and back-extract the -te form. There's no mention of the dictionary form!

There examples are Group A きます, Group B みます, Group C -1 はなします, C-2 ききます, C-3 よみます, C-4 たちます.

Confusion alert!

Can anyone help me correlate the R1-R2, Godan-Ichidan, and ABC groups to one another. I can't keep this straight!

Many thanks!

p.s. I know there's been some discussion of verbs on Japanesepod101, but I can't even recall if they gave us the verb groups (I listen to 99% of the time to beginner and newbie classes). If the pod101 categories won't confuse me more than I'd like to know those too.

[Alcyone]

Got the most important part figured out.

Japanese for Busy People R1 is Godan and R2 is Ichidan. IMHO, an unfortunate thing because when I hear r1 and I think 1 for Ichidan they're not the same group of verbs.

The other book is insane! Therefore I'll ignore it. [/i]

[jkeyz15]

I think they come up with names because they think you can't remember terms like Ichidan and Godan.

Same way that I've seen some sources try to teach the grammatical system for verbs as base 1, 2, 3, etc instead of proper names like mizenkei,ren'youkei, rentaikei, etc.