い Adjectives
い Adjectives have their い character replaced with something else.
- FIRST Apply a negative conjugation if the adjective is to be negated.
- THEN Apply past conjugation if it was a past descriptive adjective.
Negative Uses: くない Which actually brings in a new い to use for the い replacement character.
Past Conjugation: replaces い with かった
い Adjective Conjugation Example:
Dictionary Form: ねむい
- Present Affirmative: ねむいです。
- Present Negative: ねむくないです。
- Past Affirmative: ねむかったです。
- Past Negative: ねむくなかったです。
な Adjectives
な Adjectives work similarly to い adjective conjugation IFF it’s in negative form, except we “introduce” a helper to give us that い that we need to conjugate with as if it were an い adjective in this case.
The result is that for something like げんき we add じゃない to make it negative. Then we modify the い in じゃない to make it じゃなかった. Similar to how it’s performed with い adjectives.
If it’s not a negative な adjective, the です is modified from ですー＞でした。
Similar to how a verb is conjugated to past tense.
な Adjective Conjugation Example:
Dictionary Form: げんき
- Present Affirmative: げんきです。
- Present Negative: げんきじゃないです。
- Past Affirmative: げんきでした。
- Past Negative: げんきじゃなかったです。
Irregular Adjectives
Irregular Adjectives have their own very special rules, unique to the adjective.
The most notable is the いい irregular adjective.
A few other adjectives that share the ending of いい have this conjugation as well (such as かっこいい if I’m not mistaken…)
Irregular Adjective Conjugation Example:
Dictionary Form: いい
- Present Affirmative: いいです。
- Present Negative: よくないです。
- Past Affirmative: よかったです。
- Past Negative: よくなかったです。