About the Ultra Handy Japanese Verb Conjugator
Verb conjugation is the key to fluency in any language—at least in my humble opinion.
This site was the result of more than ten years of pent-up frustration at not being able to reach fluency in Japanese. I had the excuse that I did not actually live in Japan, but my wife is Japanese and my son overtook me when he was four. I could not understand what was going on in my own house half the time.
Why focus on verbs?
I had once reached a reasonable level of fluency in Spanish, which made my failure with Japanese even more annoying. Even though I probably knew almost as many words and phrases in Japanese as I did in Spanish, I could not string them together quickly enough to participate in a meaningful conversation. I eventually realised that the missing link was the ability to conjugate verbs quickly.
Why build a website?
A bit of investigation led me to discover that Japanese verb conjugation follows fairly strict rules. Once you understand the rules, you can conjugate almost any regular verb. I found that the easiest way to get my head around them was to write them out as pseudocode. Once I had done that, the next logical step was to produce a program that applied the rules. It provided extra revision for me—and I thought someone else might find it useful too.
How does the conjugator work?
A collection of functions applies the conjugation rules to the dictionary form of a Japanese verb and generates its different forms. This happens on the fly, so the conjugator can even attempt a made-up romaji verb, provided that it looks like a Japanese verb and ends in u.
The site's verb list is held in a database. When a new verb is added, it appears on the Japanese verb list and can be conjugated from there.
Why do some verbs only have romaji?
The original version of the site used romaji throughout, but visitors often asked for Japanese script as well. I added that functionality in 2015. Japanese-script conjugation is available for verbs that have corresponding kanji or kana stored in the database, as shown on the verb list.
Why “Ultra Handy” and the alien monsters?
The name and visual theme were inspired by the characters and alien monsters from Japanese Ultraman television programmes that my son was watching on repeat when I developed this site. The pictures on the site are his toys. That is why this is not merely a handy conjugator, but the Ultra Handy Japanese Verb Conjugator—and probably the only Japanese verb conjugator featuring pictures of alien monsters.
A work in progress
The site remains a work in progress, both linguistically and technically. The conjugations are generated automatically, so they should be treated as a learning guide rather than an authoritative linguistic reference.