how to know whether a verb ending in る is class 1 or class

[creighton]

Is there a way to know whether a verb ending in る is class 1 or 2? Or do i just have to memorize what class they belong to?

[a_cubed]

Verbs ending in aru, uru and oru are all class 1: ~arimasu; ~urimasu; ~orimasu. With iru and eru verbs you just have to learn. One thing I've noted is that for many (though not all) verbs with transitive and intranstive variants, one is often class one and the other class two, so that can help. E.g. tomaru/tomeru. tomaru conjugates to tomarimasu and tomeru conjugates to tomemasu. I have come across at least one verb which doesn't follow this (can't remember which it was offhand) but it can be a useful helper. When I'm memorising verbs, I always try to remember the masu-form and the dictionary form, which provides all the needed information.

[creighton]

Thanks for the help.

[mieth]

There isn't really such a thing called type 1 and type 2. They are terms that teachers came up with to try to make it easier for students to learn the verb conjugations. what there are is called godan verbs and ichidan verbs. go means 5 ichi means 1 and dan means level. In godan verbs it is possible for the last character of the word to be conjugated all 5 constonant ( I can't spell too lazy too look up) and vowel for that particular row. This is difficult to think of when you are looking at the character so if will help if you write it in romaji.

Lets take Kaku = to write
In Japanese this is two characters. 書く　（かく）. The kanji portion is ka and then you have that ku there. well it is one character but there is a whole row of characters that use the k as a constonant in the character. ka ki ku ke ko. as you can you see there are five characters. These are the 5 levels thus called godan verbs.

In ichidan verbs the gokan (which means words stem or root stem) ends in the vowell。basically most of the verbs that you hear end with a ru are going to be your "type 2" verbs. There are some exceptions of course. Hashiru sounds like a iru eru verb but is actually a godan verb.

Now the important question is what are you going to do with this information. Does it really help? I don't think so. When you are speaking in Japanese are you going to be identifying type 1 and type 2 verbs in your brain. The answer is no. You don't have the time to think about that. Do you need the information for some lame test so that a teacher can give you some grade that is meaningless.

You need to know taberu means eat. tabenai means don't eat. Who cares about grammar explanations. I was teaching English in Japan and I thought I would be a great teacher and try to look up what all this English grammar really is. I could barely understand what the hell those authors were saying beyond the most basic stuff. What I was able to decipher from all that linguistic jargon, the students were not able to understand. My linguistic teacher at the Japanese university that I attended in Japan doesn't even speak another language besides Japanese. And he is teaching Linguistics. Don't worry about lame stuff. Just learn Japanese is my advice.

Cheers and good luck with your studies.

[mutley]

I think when you're trying to remember a new verb, e.g. by making a flash card for it, it's worth writting some of the different forms of it or sentences using them (e.g. the te-form, negative form, and masu-form).
Then hoepfully you can turn them into whatever form you want on the spot during conversation. For me I think this was the big step between beginner and intermediate, being able to have a conversation without pausing mid-sentence to think about a verb conjugation.

[iaai]

I've never really used the terms godan, ichidan, type 1 and 2 etc. when I've been learning new verbs. Rather, I think of so-called godan verbs as being the flexible type, while ichidan verbs as being the rigid type. I prefer to rememeber which of the two ways the verb is used in, instead of sticking a label on each verb which just gives me another thing to learn.

[salivia_baker]

For em it's helpful to know if a verb is Ichidan or Godan (my textbooks also call them u-verbs and iru/eru-verbs). Because I then know how do make the endings. I don't have to learn each verb with the ending if I know in which category it falls. Though I do look up a the verbs with the る ending to make sure in which category they fall.

Though I do agree with mieth to a certain degree that at some point you can give a frak about the grammar and just go with your feeling. Though when starting out grammar is a great tool to help you get a feeling for the language.