Verb Practice Exercises

Vocabulary used in this section

Here is a list of a few verbs and the accompanying kanji that you will find useful.

Kanji
I have listed the kanji you will need for the vocabulary for your convenience. The link will take you to a diagram of the stroke order. However, it doesn't clearly show the direction (though you can kind of tell by the animation) so you should check with a kanji dictionary if you're not sure. I recommend practicing the kanji in the context of real words (such as the ones below).

1.   見 - see

2.   来 - come; next

3.   行 - go; conduct

4.   帰 - go home

5.   食 - eat; food

6.   飲 - drink

7.   買 - buy

8.   売 - sell

9.   持 - hold

10.   待 - wait

11.   読 - read

12.   歩 - walk

13.   走 - run

14.   遊 - play

Vocabulary

Here is a list of some common verbs you will definitely want to learn at some point.

1.   する - to do

2.   しゃべる - to talk; to chat

3.   見る【みる】 - to see

4.   来る【くる】 - to come

5.   行く【いく】 - to go

6.   帰る 【かえる】 - to go home

7.   食べる 【たべる】 - to eat

8.   飲む 【のむ】 - to drink

9.   買う 【かう】 - to buy

10.   売る 【うる】 - to sell

11.   切る 【きる】 - to cut

12.   入る 【はいる】 - to enter

13.   出る 【でる】 - to come out

14.   持つ 【もつ】 - to hold

15.   待つ 【まつ】 - to wait

16.   書く【かく】 - to write

17.   読む 【よむ】 - to read

18.   歩く 【あるく】 - to walk

19.   走る 【はしる】 - to run

20.   遊ぶ 【あそぶ】 - to play

Practice with Verb Classification

There's really not much to do at this point except to practice classifying verbs as either a ru-verb or an u-verb. You can also take this opportunity to learn some useful verbs if you do not know them already. We'll learn how to conjugate these verbs according to their category in the next few sections.

In the chart below, you should mark whether the given verb is either an u-verb or a ru-verb. The first answer is given as an example of what you need to do. Obviously, verbs that do not end in 「る」 are always going to be u-verbs so the tricky part is figuring out the category for verbs that end in 「る」. Remember that verbs that do not end in "eru" or "iru" will always be u-verbs. While most verbs that do end in "eru" or "iru" are ru-verbs, to make things interesting, I've also included a number of u-verbs that also end in eru/iru. Though you do not need to memorize every word in the list by any means, you should at least memorize the basic verbs.