Posted on by Tae Kim

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. 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. 切 – cut
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

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.

verb ru-verb u-verb exception verb
行く   ●  
出る ●    
する     ●
買う   ●  
売る   ●  
食べる ●    
入る   ●  
来る     ●
飲む   ●  
しゃべる   ●  
見る ●    
切る   ●  
帰る   ●  
書く   ●  
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