*Spanish has that dual state/essence thing going on with estar/ser "to be"*
Or to say it differently, English uses the same verb "is" for two or more different meanings. Several languages use their "is" verb for "Tom is a doctor", but many of them don't use the same verb for "Tom is tall" or for "Tom is happy".
You are asking about irregular (irregularly conjugated) verbs. That implies that verbs are conjugated, which is not true for all languages. Languages like French, Spanish and Turkish have many (100+) different conjugations, based on verb tense, person (1st/2d/3d), plurality, subjunctive mood and other factors. Japanese has much fewer. Chinese has none.
*When people start learning a language of course they need to start with the most commonly used verbs which are the most irregular. I think this gives people a false impression that languages are incredibly hard to learn.*
I see your point. I don't know if there is a solution. I saw one person suggest (for Russian) that when you first start, you just learn the verb conjugations that are used a lot, or even just the ones that you see being used. Save learning the entire "conjugation system" for much later. You will notice that some verbs are different than others, but you won't know which of those are part of a "correct" system and which are "irregular".
Turkish may have many conjugations, but every verb follows an entirely regular conjugation pattern so they are remarkably straightforward to learn coming from a background of Indo-European languages. You learn the rule once then you can apply it to every verb.
> I saw one person suggest (for Russian) that when you first start, you just learn the verb conjugations that are used a lot, or even just the ones that you see being used.
This is what I did for French. One day I just threw the verb conjugations for the 50 most common verbs into my Anki deck.
It worked way way better than I expected.
I failed all the cards the first few times, but after maybe a week my brain just started absorbing the patterns automatically.
> Spanish has that dual state/essence thing going on with estar/ser "to be"
For whatever reason, I often hear this mentioned about Spanish but it pales in comparison to the ten-odd copulæ Dutch has but it's never mentioned about Dutch.
I notice that often it's tradition to mention things about certain languages which aren't mentioned in others even though the same things apply.
> Japanese has much fewer
Depends on how one counts. There's a good argument that what are called “auxiliary verbs” in Japanese are actually conjugations and many do have irregular forms for some verbs and if those are counted, together with all the suffixes and possible ways they can be combined then Japanese has infinite combinations as an agglutinative language. One can very much argue that /wakaranakunaQtjaisoo/ for “[I] might just end up no longer understanding it” is a conjugation of the verb. It's certainly pronounced as one prosodic unit in practice though /wakaranaku naQtjaisoo/ can also occur.
I think it's probably because Spanish is studied a lot more than Dutch. I mean many other languages have a huge number of conjugations, but most people aren't exposed to them specifically.
Well, people talk a lot about Dutch diminutives and not a lot about German ones, but they mostly have the same issues and traps though I suppose the formation of Dutch diminutives is more of a pain than in German but the semantically correct usage is fairly similar.
“zijn”, “staan”, “lopen”, “zitten”, “liggen”, “hangen”, “vallen”. come to mind.
As in
- “I'm twelve years old." -> “Ik ben twaalf jaar oud.” [zijn]
- “The door was [left] open.” -> “De deur stond open.” -> [staan]
- “It's stuck” -> “Het zit vast.” [zitten]
- “There is filth on the table.” [sticky filth] -> “Er zit vuil op de tafel" [zitten]
- “There is filth on the table.” [crumbly filth] -> “Er ligt vuil op de tafel.”
- “I am complaining.” -> “Ik loop te klagen.” [lopen]
Among some examples. In many cases multiple ones can be used which alter the meaning. As in “Het staat geschreven.” for “It is written” has a religious or constitutional connotation, implying that what is written is canon law that can never be changed and “Het is geschreven” means the same but has no such connotation. “Het zit geschreven.” is also theoretically possible I guess but implies it was only recently written down, almost implying it took a lot of effort to write it down and that a long task is now finally done but it sounds somewhat theoretical.
Most of those are just compound verbs, and they exist in other Germanic languages as well. Something isn’t a copula just because it is sometimes translated into English as a form of the verb *to be*.
It's a copula because it links a subject to a complement.
It's not a compound verb any more than “I am tall” is a compound of “to be” and “tall” that makes no sense. It links the subject to the compliment and like with any complement in Dutch, the complement can be in the comparative or superlative mood and other such things.
Can you give a grammatical argument how it's different from the two copulæ of Spanish?
>they are used so often they're likely to evolve in odd ways
It's the opposite actually. They are used so often they hardly change at all over time. People simply continue to memorize fixed forms that sometimes stretch way, way back in time. When irregular forms become less common, people don't learn them, and that's when they 'evolve' into regular forms. Here's a fascinating paper that shows this process through computer simulation: [https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=e5bc94f7f841b83012d3895839f539bf85270532](https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=e5bc94f7f841b83012d3895839f539bf85270532)
>>they are used so often they’re likely to evolve in odd ways
>It’s the opposite actually. They are used so often they hardly change at all over time.
It surprises me how many people believe that. What OP said initially is correct. Frequently used forms are whittled down over time. Just look at how Latin *habere* turned into Italian *avere*:
| habere | avere |
|:--------|:--------|
| habeo | ho |
| habes | hai |
| habet | ha |
| habemus | abbiamo |
| habetis | avete |
| habent | hanno |
Note how *habere* has a clearly defined stem (*habe*-) that stays the same for every form, plus a regular ending (-*o*, -*s*, -*t*, -*mus*, -*tis*, -*ent*). In *avere*, these forms have been reduced to amorphous blobs that can no longer be divided into individual morphemes.
Now let’s take a look at a verb that has stayed regular (at least in the present tense):
| videre | vedere |
|:--------|:--------|
| video | vedo |
| vides | vedi |
| videt | vede |
| videmus | vediamo |
| videtis | vedete |
| vident | vedono |
As you can see, each form of both verbs can be divided into a unchanging stem and an ending. Now, both the stem and the endings changed over time, by that happened purely through sound shifts, not through clipping.
This is framed like a rebuttal, but I don't get it. This thread is about irregular forms, you're talking about word length. I provided an academic source already that explains why frequency is an important factor for irregulars, and that same paper also discusses factors that affect word length. Did you read it?
I disagree, and it would really surprise me to hear an advanced student in Spanish, for example, look back on a handful of irregular verb patterns and say that was "the hard part" in their thousands-hour journey to fluency.
I'm not an advanced learner, yet, but my journey started in high school (a long time ago). OP seems to suggest that someone would feel obligated to learn all these common, irregular verbs right out the gate, but that's not how it's done in an actual, structured classroom. In Spanish, we started with a regular, -AR verb. Then a regular -IR and -ER verb. Then you get slowly introduced to verbs like ser, estar, and tener. And even though there are irregular verbs, a lot of them establish regular patterns. For instance, if I have learned how to conjugate poner, then suponer follows the same pattern, and if I've learned how to conjugate tener, then when I learn mantener, it follows the same pattern. The irregularities still follow a regular pattern for the most part.
The hardest parts of Spanish for me have been recognizing and learning the subjunctive mood triggers, when to use preterite vs. imperfect tenses, and vocabulary/slang changing depending on where someone is from. Just ask a native speaker what they call a straw. You could get eight different answers depending on where they're from.
>IIRC "to have" uses a prepositional construction rather than a verb in languages like Arabic and Irish.
Possession with "[x] is to me" is a really common thing in world languages.
Logically this does not make sense. Verbs being irregular genuinely makes languages harder to learn. It's literally right there in the name. While some extremely common verbs may tend to be irregular but are learned fairly well due sheer exposure rate there are plenty of less common, somewhat common, not so common, fairly rare and very rare verbs that are also irregular. They genuinely make languages harder. It's not an appearance.
I understand the point you're trying to make and it's a great idea to understand why a verb is irregular as it can help with learning it but I think dabbling or taking an overview of a language can perhaps give a false impression and make languages seem easier than they really are because for most genuinely progressing through the levels (beginner-advanced) languages get harder as they progress and remain hard for quite a while and when there are a substantial number of irregular verbs that certainly plays a part in a language's overall difficulty.
You might be right. It's often said that Japanese has only two irregular verbs, “do” and “come”.
This is very wrong, it just so happens that many of the irregular verbs in Japanese are actually either relatively obscure verbs or obscure honorific forms of relatively common verbs that aren't an immediate need for language learners, so they aren't told about them.
On that note; it's quite common for languages to have relatively obscure irregular nouns such as the plural of the names of many animals in English such as “oxen”, “geese”, and “mice” that most language learners wouldn't immediately care about. Latin also has a fair deal of irregular uncommon who decline in interesting ways; the same is true for German and Dutch.
I think I can top that from what I can think of right now easily to be honest:
1. する
1. 来る
1. ある [negative form is ない]
1. いる [respectful form is いっしゃる]
1. 行く [いっしゃる]
1. 言う [おっしゃる]
1. 見る [ご覧になる]
1. 着る [召す]
1. 飲む [召し上がる]
1. 食べる [召し上がる]
1. くれる [下さる]
1. 知る [ご存知になる]
1. 分かる [ご存知になる]
1. 気に入る [お気に召す」
1. 座る [お掛けになる]
1. もらう [humble form is いただく]
2. 受ける [いただく]
1. あげる [差し上げる]
1. 会う [お目にかける]
1. いい [sou-form is よさそう]
1. ない [なさそう]
1. 問う [past form is 問うた]
1. 乞う [乞うた]
And I only listed one irregular form of each to show the verbs are irregular. Almost all that have an irregular respectful form also have an irregular humble form though some fundamentally don't due to what they mean.
I found a list [here](https://www.baitoru.com/contents/serial/0037.html) which lists some other forms I couldn't think of at the time though some of the irregular forms are optional, both “お考えになる” and ”ご考察になる” can be used but in all the ones I listed the regular form simply isn't an option at all. One can't say “お食べになる”, it must be “召し上がる”
One thing I dislike about Reddit, is quite often someone like yourself manages to gets first dibs, sounds like they know what they're talking about and gets voted up, anyone daring to disagree gets downvoted. Then utters nonsense posts like this.
* 1, 2 & 3 are irregular
* 3, 4 & 5 possibly
* 5~19 are substitutions for politer phrases. The original verbs/conjugations haven't disappeared, so these are not examples of irregularity in any sense of its meaning.
* 20 - "いい" is not a verb, it is an adjective.
* 22, 23 - irregular
So, nine at the most.
> 5~19 are substitutions for politer phrases. The original verbs/conjugations haven't disappeared, so these are not examples of irregularity in any sense of its meaning.
Can you get real examples of the usage of the regular forms here? When I google most of them I either get no real hits, or native speakers saying it's not grammatical. Who says “お言いになる”? I've never seen that in my life. The correct form is “おっしゃる”. The first hit when searching for it is [this](http://www.nagomi-project.com/rules2_keigo.html).
It does show up in some grammar tables as an alternative when looking for it, but no one says it either and when not specifically searching for it, all grammar tables only come with “おっしゃる” as the honorific form of “言う”. None of the grammar tables that I found when searching for “言うの謙譲語” list “お言いになる”. One has to search for that specific phrase to find in some obscure tables and can you actually say you've actually seen it once in your life without searching for it? When searching for it I couldn't find it any actual spontaneous context, only in discussions where people say it's not correct, and some grammar tables that do list it as an alternative but it feels those are simply following regular rules and not actual speech.
”お行きになる” seems to have some actual usage in the wild when, searching for it, which surprised me. But “お見になる”, “お着になる” [which would be interpreted as “お気になる” in speech anyway], “お飲みになる”, “お食べになる" and such simply don't.
For the humble forms, the same applies, no one is going to say “おもらいいたす” either. It's “いただく”
> 20 - "いい" is not a verb, it is an adjective.
That is a matter of semantics. Most grammar teaches that “i-adjectictives" are simply a class of verbs in Japanese. They conjugate for all the forms that verbs do and the distinction isnt material.
Wel that's what the original post mentioned, the irregular honorific forms of many common verbs and I disagree that it's not irregular because most verbs have an irregular respectful form and language learners have to memorize the irregular respectful form.
For a verb such as “歩く” the respectful form is regular, it's simply ”お歩きになる”, the same thing for “お読みになる”, “お落としになる”, “お呼びになる” and so forth but for a few verbs the respectful form has to be memorized and is irregular.
It's a verbal conjugation. It's so much simply a verbal conjugation that these verbs are even used when verbals are themselves used grammatically such that the respectful form of “してみる” becomes “してご覧になる” even though this “みる” has completely lost it's original meaning of “to see”.
I agree with /u/LeoScipio here.
Honorific verbs are a different concept to regular/irregular verbs. There are several levels to honorific usage, and whilst there are some regular ways you can conjugate to make it honorific, Some of your examples, where substitutions for other more polite phrases do not mean that that verb becomes irregular.
In several of your examples, they haven't replaced actual regular usage. *見る ^^^miru* becoming *ご覧になる ^^^go-ran ^^^ni ^^^naru* just makes it more polite, 見る still exists. It is using a different word/phrase altogether to make it polite.
I would compare "見る" becoming "ご覧になる" to Romance languages where pronouns are often replaced to make the sentence more polite. In all the examples below, the original is still in use. These are ways of making the phrase more polite.
* tu -> vous (French)
* tu/vosotros -> usted/ustedes (Spanish)
* tu -> você -> o senhor/a senhora (Portuguese)
> In several of your examples, they haven't replaced actual regular usage. 見る miru becoming ご覧になる go-ran ni naru just makes it more polite, 見る still exists. It is using a different word/phrase altogether to make it polite.
>
>
But one can't say “お見になる”; one can't use the normal regular respectful form.
The point is that all verbs in Japanese have a respectful form unless it fundamentally not make sense such as verbs only applied to oneself and this form is regular for the overwhelming majority of verbs, but a couple of common, and even some not so common verbs have irregular respectful forms. These forms have to be memorized by language learners like any other irregular form. The expected regular respectful form of “見る” is “お見になる”. People don't say this; they say “ご覧になる” instead.
The issue is that you somehow don't seem to feel the respectful and humble forms of verbs as a conjugation of them which I find dubious, because:
1. Students have to learn them like any other conjugation in order to use them.
2. They can be regular or irregular like any other conjugation.
> I would compare "見る" becoming "ご覧になる" to Romance languages where pronouns are often replaced to make the sentence more polite. In all the examples below, the original is still in use. These are ways of making the phrase more polite.
Well firstly pronouns are irregular and secondly, this would only make sense if a language had many pronouns, such as Japanese, with the majority having regular respectful forms, but a small number having completely irregular ones. In fact, some pronouns in Japanese are also irregular. The possessive form of “我” is not the expected “我の” but “我が”. “彼” is also defective and “彼たち” for whatever reason doesn't occur and neither does “我たち” where “我々” is used instead. These pronouns can be indeed be said to be irregular while other pronouns in Japanese are regular.
Yes, and that's why I teach expressions and use context, not drill-and-kill. For scaffolding, I will put a little boot symbol on certain writing exercises until students no longer need it. It's also how I'm organizing my own verb-learning process.
Agreed - and another thing that you learn with time is the patterns in the irregularity. At this point in my Spanish journey, the verbs legitimately don't seem so irregular to me, not just because I've also learned a ton of regular verbs but also because I'm familiar with the different possible patterns of irregularity and learned the few outright exceptions to them. I'm not there yet with Polish but verb conjugation is definitely less surprising than it used to be, and figuring out some of the common patterns and alternations has made it so that even initially completely bewildering conjugations like *ciąć* -> *ja tnę* start to seem halfway logical.
In my opinion it’s new concepts that make the language difficult. I’m surprised you mentioned German because I would say the verbs are the easiest part of German. The sentence structure and cases make it difficult. Japanese verbs are also simple and have no conjugations but the logic of the language is totally different to European languages.
I totally get where you are coming from in some respect. My mother tongue is English and the first language I learned was French, my school teacher focussed so much on the irregular verb endings and regular verb endings in the pluperfect, imperfect etc tenses and I found it very hard to keep up. I now know that this is because we were learning the endings but not applying them in normal sentences which showed that they were just incorporated and learned like any other word.
Now when I learn other languages like Danish, korean, Arabic, Finnish etc I find it easier to just make sentences where the irregular endings can be used and learn then that way!
*Spanish has that dual state/essence thing going on with estar/ser "to be"* Or to say it differently, English uses the same verb "is" for two or more different meanings. Several languages use their "is" verb for "Tom is a doctor", but many of them don't use the same verb for "Tom is tall" or for "Tom is happy". You are asking about irregular (irregularly conjugated) verbs. That implies that verbs are conjugated, which is not true for all languages. Languages like French, Spanish and Turkish have many (100+) different conjugations, based on verb tense, person (1st/2d/3d), plurality, subjunctive mood and other factors. Japanese has much fewer. Chinese has none. *When people start learning a language of course they need to start with the most commonly used verbs which are the most irregular. I think this gives people a false impression that languages are incredibly hard to learn.* I see your point. I don't know if there is a solution. I saw one person suggest (for Russian) that when you first start, you just learn the verb conjugations that are used a lot, or even just the ones that you see being used. Save learning the entire "conjugation system" for much later. You will notice that some verbs are different than others, but you won't know which of those are part of a "correct" system and which are "irregular".
Turkish may have many conjugations, but every verb follows an entirely regular conjugation pattern so they are remarkably straightforward to learn coming from a background of Indo-European languages. You learn the rule once then you can apply it to every verb.
> I saw one person suggest (for Russian) that when you first start, you just learn the verb conjugations that are used a lot, or even just the ones that you see being used. This is what I did for French. One day I just threw the verb conjugations for the 50 most common verbs into my Anki deck. It worked way way better than I expected. I failed all the cards the first few times, but after maybe a week my brain just started absorbing the patterns automatically.
> Spanish has that dual state/essence thing going on with estar/ser "to be" For whatever reason, I often hear this mentioned about Spanish but it pales in comparison to the ten-odd copulæ Dutch has but it's never mentioned about Dutch. I notice that often it's tradition to mention things about certain languages which aren't mentioned in others even though the same things apply. > Japanese has much fewer Depends on how one counts. There's a good argument that what are called “auxiliary verbs” in Japanese are actually conjugations and many do have irregular forms for some verbs and if those are counted, together with all the suffixes and possible ways they can be combined then Japanese has infinite combinations as an agglutinative language. One can very much argue that /wakaranakunaQtjaisoo/ for “[I] might just end up no longer understanding it” is a conjugation of the verb. It's certainly pronounced as one prosodic unit in practice though /wakaranaku naQtjaisoo/ can also occur.
I think it's probably because Spanish is studied a lot more than Dutch. I mean many other languages have a huge number of conjugations, but most people aren't exposed to them specifically.
Well, people talk a lot about Dutch diminutives and not a lot about German ones, but they mostly have the same issues and traps though I suppose the formation of Dutch diminutives is more of a pain than in German but the semantically correct usage is fairly similar.
What are the ten-odd copulae Dutch has?
“zijn”, “staan”, “lopen”, “zitten”, “liggen”, “hangen”, “vallen”. come to mind. As in - “I'm twelve years old." -> “Ik ben twaalf jaar oud.” [zijn] - “The door was [left] open.” -> “De deur stond open.” -> [staan] - “It's stuck” -> “Het zit vast.” [zitten] - “There is filth on the table.” [sticky filth] -> “Er zit vuil op de tafel" [zitten] - “There is filth on the table.” [crumbly filth] -> “Er ligt vuil op de tafel.” - “I am complaining.” -> “Ik loop te klagen.” [lopen] Among some examples. In many cases multiple ones can be used which alter the meaning. As in “Het staat geschreven.” for “It is written” has a religious or constitutional connotation, implying that what is written is canon law that can never be changed and “Het is geschreven” means the same but has no such connotation. “Het zit geschreven.” is also theoretically possible I guess but implies it was only recently written down, almost implying it took a lot of effort to write it down and that a long task is now finally done but it sounds somewhat theoretical.
Most of those are just compound verbs, and they exist in other Germanic languages as well. Something isn’t a copula just because it is sometimes translated into English as a form of the verb *to be*.
It's a copula because it links a subject to a complement. It's not a compound verb any more than “I am tall” is a compound of “to be” and “tall” that makes no sense. It links the subject to the compliment and like with any complement in Dutch, the complement can be in the comparative or superlative mood and other such things. Can you give a grammatical argument how it's different from the two copulæ of Spanish?
Each Spanish verb form has tops 60 forms, but i get your point
>they are used so often they're likely to evolve in odd ways It's the opposite actually. They are used so often they hardly change at all over time. People simply continue to memorize fixed forms that sometimes stretch way, way back in time. When irregular forms become less common, people don't learn them, and that's when they 'evolve' into regular forms. Here's a fascinating paper that shows this process through computer simulation: [https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=e5bc94f7f841b83012d3895839f539bf85270532](https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=e5bc94f7f841b83012d3895839f539bf85270532)
>>they are used so often they’re likely to evolve in odd ways >It’s the opposite actually. They are used so often they hardly change at all over time. It surprises me how many people believe that. What OP said initially is correct. Frequently used forms are whittled down over time. Just look at how Latin *habere* turned into Italian *avere*: | habere | avere | |:--------|:--------| | habeo | ho | | habes | hai | | habet | ha | | habemus | abbiamo | | habetis | avete | | habent | hanno | Note how *habere* has a clearly defined stem (*habe*-) that stays the same for every form, plus a regular ending (-*o*, -*s*, -*t*, -*mus*, -*tis*, -*ent*). In *avere*, these forms have been reduced to amorphous blobs that can no longer be divided into individual morphemes. Now let’s take a look at a verb that has stayed regular (at least in the present tense): | videre | vedere | |:--------|:--------| | video | vedo | | vides | vedi | | videt | vede | | videmus | vediamo | | videtis | vedete | | vident | vedono | As you can see, each form of both verbs can be divided into a unchanging stem and an ending. Now, both the stem and the endings changed over time, by that happened purely through sound shifts, not through clipping.
This is framed like a rebuttal, but I don't get it. This thread is about irregular forms, you're talking about word length. I provided an academic source already that explains why frequency is an important factor for irregulars, and that same paper also discusses factors that affect word length. Did you read it?
I disagree, and it would really surprise me to hear an advanced student in Spanish, for example, look back on a handful of irregular verb patterns and say that was "the hard part" in their thousands-hour journey to fluency.
I'm not an advanced learner, yet, but my journey started in high school (a long time ago). OP seems to suggest that someone would feel obligated to learn all these common, irregular verbs right out the gate, but that's not how it's done in an actual, structured classroom. In Spanish, we started with a regular, -AR verb. Then a regular -IR and -ER verb. Then you get slowly introduced to verbs like ser, estar, and tener. And even though there are irregular verbs, a lot of them establish regular patterns. For instance, if I have learned how to conjugate poner, then suponer follows the same pattern, and if I've learned how to conjugate tener, then when I learn mantener, it follows the same pattern. The irregularities still follow a regular pattern for the most part. The hardest parts of Spanish for me have been recognizing and learning the subjunctive mood triggers, when to use preterite vs. imperfect tenses, and vocabulary/slang changing depending on where someone is from. Just ask a native speaker what they call a straw. You could get eight different answers depending on where they're from.
>IIRC "to have" uses a prepositional construction rather than a verb in languages like Arabic and Irish. Possession with "[x] is to me" is a really common thing in world languages.
Logically this does not make sense. Verbs being irregular genuinely makes languages harder to learn. It's literally right there in the name. While some extremely common verbs may tend to be irregular but are learned fairly well due sheer exposure rate there are plenty of less common, somewhat common, not so common, fairly rare and very rare verbs that are also irregular. They genuinely make languages harder. It's not an appearance. I understand the point you're trying to make and it's a great idea to understand why a verb is irregular as it can help with learning it but I think dabbling or taking an overview of a language can perhaps give a false impression and make languages seem easier than they really are because for most genuinely progressing through the levels (beginner-advanced) languages get harder as they progress and remain hard for quite a while and when there are a substantial number of irregular verbs that certainly plays a part in a language's overall difficulty.
You might be right. It's often said that Japanese has only two irregular verbs, “do” and “come”. This is very wrong, it just so happens that many of the irregular verbs in Japanese are actually either relatively obscure verbs or obscure honorific forms of relatively common verbs that aren't an immediate need for language learners, so they aren't told about them. On that note; it's quite common for languages to have relatively obscure irregular nouns such as the plural of the names of many animals in English such as “oxen”, “geese”, and “mice” that most language learners wouldn't immediately care about. Latin also has a fair deal of irregular uncommon who decline in interesting ways; the same is true for German and Dutch.
Yeah but we're looking at a handful of irregular verbs regardless. I mean, if we count them all we don't even get to 20.
I think I can top that from what I can think of right now easily to be honest: 1. する 1. 来る 1. ある [negative form is ない] 1. いる [respectful form is いっしゃる] 1. 行く [いっしゃる] 1. 言う [おっしゃる] 1. 見る [ご覧になる] 1. 着る [召す] 1. 飲む [召し上がる] 1. 食べる [召し上がる] 1. くれる [下さる] 1. 知る [ご存知になる] 1. 分かる [ご存知になる] 1. 気に入る [お気に召す」 1. 座る [お掛けになる] 1. もらう [humble form is いただく] 2. 受ける [いただく] 1. あげる [差し上げる] 1. 会う [お目にかける] 1. いい [sou-form is よさそう] 1. ない [なさそう] 1. 問う [past form is 問うた] 1. 乞う [乞うた] And I only listed one irregular form of each to show the verbs are irregular. Almost all that have an irregular respectful form also have an irregular humble form though some fundamentally don't due to what they mean. I found a list [here](https://www.baitoru.com/contents/serial/0037.html) which lists some other forms I couldn't think of at the time though some of the irregular forms are optional, both “お考えになる” and ”ご考察になる” can be used but in all the ones I listed the regular form simply isn't an option at all. One can't say “お食べになる”, it must be “召し上がる”
One thing I dislike about Reddit, is quite often someone like yourself manages to gets first dibs, sounds like they know what they're talking about and gets voted up, anyone daring to disagree gets downvoted. Then utters nonsense posts like this. * 1, 2 & 3 are irregular * 3, 4 & 5 possibly * 5~19 are substitutions for politer phrases. The original verbs/conjugations haven't disappeared, so these are not examples of irregularity in any sense of its meaning. * 20 - "いい" is not a verb, it is an adjective. * 22, 23 - irregular So, nine at the most.
Not to mention a lot of those are wrong lol
> 5~19 are substitutions for politer phrases. The original verbs/conjugations haven't disappeared, so these are not examples of irregularity in any sense of its meaning. Can you get real examples of the usage of the regular forms here? When I google most of them I either get no real hits, or native speakers saying it's not grammatical. Who says “お言いになる”? I've never seen that in my life. The correct form is “おっしゃる”. The first hit when searching for it is [this](http://www.nagomi-project.com/rules2_keigo.html). It does show up in some grammar tables as an alternative when looking for it, but no one says it either and when not specifically searching for it, all grammar tables only come with “おっしゃる” as the honorific form of “言う”. None of the grammar tables that I found when searching for “言うの謙譲語” list “お言いになる”. One has to search for that specific phrase to find in some obscure tables and can you actually say you've actually seen it once in your life without searching for it? When searching for it I couldn't find it any actual spontaneous context, only in discussions where people say it's not correct, and some grammar tables that do list it as an alternative but it feels those are simply following regular rules and not actual speech. ”お行きになる” seems to have some actual usage in the wild when, searching for it, which surprised me. But “お見になる”, “お着になる” [which would be interpreted as “お気になる” in speech anyway], “お飲みになる”, “お食べになる" and such simply don't. For the humble forms, the same applies, no one is going to say “おもらいいたす” either. It's “いただく” > 20 - "いい" is not a verb, it is an adjective. That is a matter of semantics. Most grammar teaches that “i-adjectictives" are simply a class of verbs in Japanese. They conjugate for all the forms that verbs do and the distinction isnt material.
Honestly that's not exactly an irregular verb list in my opinion, it's a bit different. Keigo is a different concept, 食べる> 召し上がる is not irregular.
Wel that's what the original post mentioned, the irregular honorific forms of many common verbs and I disagree that it's not irregular because most verbs have an irregular respectful form and language learners have to memorize the irregular respectful form. For a verb such as “歩く” the respectful form is regular, it's simply ”お歩きになる”, the same thing for “お読みになる”, “お落としになる”, “お呼びになる” and so forth but for a few verbs the respectful form has to be memorized and is irregular. It's a verbal conjugation. It's so much simply a verbal conjugation that these verbs are even used when verbals are themselves used grammatically such that the respectful form of “してみる” becomes “してご覧になる” even though this “みる” has completely lost it's original meaning of “to see”.
I agree with /u/LeoScipio here. Honorific verbs are a different concept to regular/irregular verbs. There are several levels to honorific usage, and whilst there are some regular ways you can conjugate to make it honorific, Some of your examples, where substitutions for other more polite phrases do not mean that that verb becomes irregular. In several of your examples, they haven't replaced actual regular usage. *見る ^^^miru* becoming *ご覧になる ^^^go-ran ^^^ni ^^^naru* just makes it more polite, 見る still exists. It is using a different word/phrase altogether to make it polite. I would compare "見る" becoming "ご覧になる" to Romance languages where pronouns are often replaced to make the sentence more polite. In all the examples below, the original is still in use. These are ways of making the phrase more polite. * tu -> vous (French) * tu/vosotros -> usted/ustedes (Spanish) * tu -> você -> o senhor/a senhora (Portuguese)
> In several of your examples, they haven't replaced actual regular usage. 見る miru becoming ご覧になる go-ran ni naru just makes it more polite, 見る still exists. It is using a different word/phrase altogether to make it polite. > > But one can't say “お見になる”; one can't use the normal regular respectful form. The point is that all verbs in Japanese have a respectful form unless it fundamentally not make sense such as verbs only applied to oneself and this form is regular for the overwhelming majority of verbs, but a couple of common, and even some not so common verbs have irregular respectful forms. These forms have to be memorized by language learners like any other irregular form. The expected regular respectful form of “見る” is “お見になる”. People don't say this; they say “ご覧になる” instead. The issue is that you somehow don't seem to feel the respectful and humble forms of verbs as a conjugation of them which I find dubious, because: 1. Students have to learn them like any other conjugation in order to use them. 2. They can be regular or irregular like any other conjugation. > I would compare "見る" becoming "ご覧になる" to Romance languages where pronouns are often replaced to make the sentence more polite. In all the examples below, the original is still in use. These are ways of making the phrase more polite. Well firstly pronouns are irregular and secondly, this would only make sense if a language had many pronouns, such as Japanese, with the majority having regular respectful forms, but a small number having completely irregular ones. In fact, some pronouns in Japanese are also irregular. The possessive form of “我” is not the expected “我の” but “我が”. “彼” is also defective and “彼たち” for whatever reason doesn't occur and neither does “我たち” where “我々” is used instead. These pronouns can be indeed be said to be irregular while other pronouns in Japanese are regular.
> いる [respectful form is いっしゃる] > > 行く [いっしゃる] いらっしゃる
Yea, I agree with this 100% lol
Yes, and that's why I teach expressions and use context, not drill-and-kill. For scaffolding, I will put a little boot symbol on certain writing exercises until students no longer need it. It's also how I'm organizing my own verb-learning process.
Agreed - and another thing that you learn with time is the patterns in the irregularity. At this point in my Spanish journey, the verbs legitimately don't seem so irregular to me, not just because I've also learned a ton of regular verbs but also because I'm familiar with the different possible patterns of irregularity and learned the few outright exceptions to them. I'm not there yet with Polish but verb conjugation is definitely less surprising than it used to be, and figuring out some of the common patterns and alternations has made it so that even initially completely bewildering conjugations like *ciąć* -> *ja tnę* start to seem halfway logical.
In my opinion it’s new concepts that make the language difficult. I’m surprised you mentioned German because I would say the verbs are the easiest part of German. The sentence structure and cases make it difficult. Japanese verbs are also simple and have no conjugations but the logic of the language is totally different to European languages.
I totally get where you are coming from in some respect. My mother tongue is English and the first language I learned was French, my school teacher focussed so much on the irregular verb endings and regular verb endings in the pluperfect, imperfect etc tenses and I found it very hard to keep up. I now know that this is because we were learning the endings but not applying them in normal sentences which showed that they were just incorporated and learned like any other word. Now when I learn other languages like Danish, korean, Arabic, Finnish etc I find it easier to just make sentences where the irregular endings can be used and learn then that way!