する confusion

Hi, I just did some online conjugation tests and all went ok until I had to conjugate する to the negative past.

I didn’t know the answer so after I answered wrongly I got the answer - しなかった

I just spent an hour searching Bunpro, the forum but I simply can’t find the lesson on BunPro that explains the conjucation of する.

There is one lesson, 4: 5/13 which mentions ‘We will learn more about each of these conjugations of する, and their individual meanings at a later stage.’

When I search on the BunPro site for しなかった I get 0 results.

I’m probably completely overlooking something but if anyone can help me out here, please do :slight_smile:

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する should be touched on in most lessons that involve some sort of conjugation of a verb, but I do notice it doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the structure for some of them. It doesn’t really make sense to give する individual lessons for each type of conjugation it can get since there’d just be too many, but I don’t mind writing out a list here to show all the different ways it gets conjugated. I’ll put them in categories where they share common patterns.

For the most part, する can be seen behaving very similarly to how ichidan verbs conjugate. The only difference is that す gets changed to し:
Past: する → した (見る → 見た)
Negative: する → しない (見る → 見ない)
Negative past: する → しなかった (見る → 見なかった)
Volitional: する → しよう (見る → 見よう)
て form: する → して (見る → 見て)
Conditional (たら): する → したら (見る → 見たら)
Imperative: する → しろ (見る → 見ろ)
Want: する → したい (見る → 見たい)
ます form: する → します (見る → 見ます)

There’s conjugations where the す is changed the same way the る is:
Passive: する → される (見る → 見られる) – notice how す changes to ~あ just like る does
Causative: する → させる (見る → 見させる)
Causative-passive: する → させられる (見る → 見させられる)

There’s then conjugations where する follows exactly how ichidan verbs conjugate:
Conditional (ば): する → すれば (見る → 見れば)

Then there’s potential, which is quite different but is fairly easy to remember:
する → できる (ex: 勉強する → 勉強できる)

Hopefully that somewhat helps!

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Unless I’m missing something this point is incomplete: う-Verb (Negative) (JLPT N5) | Bunpro – Japanese Grammar Explained

If only lists ある as a special case, not 来る or する.

Once your have the non-past negative (しない) the past version is fully regular (〜ない→〜なかった).

That being said since ある is also mentioned in う-Verb (Negative-Past) (JLPT N5) | Bunpro – Japanese Grammar Explained it couldn’t hurt to mention 来る and する there too.

EDIT: I just realized that the rationale is probably simply that 来る and する are special enough that they’re not considered godan/う verbs. That’s probably why there’s not a very convenient place to put them in bunpro.

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That helps a ton! Great explanation, thanks.

I did find the conjugations after googling of course, but this seemed like an elemental lesson and I was just so surprised I couldn’t find it in the Bunpro lessons.
Especially since the する lesson does mention all the other conjugations will be learned in a later stage, but apparently not in a dedicated lesson.

Yeah conjugations in general are a bit of a weak point in bunpro because it doesn’t really let you test every pattern independently.

Fortunately there are very few of those in Japanese, so it’s only a very temporary problem mostly limited to some N5 grammar…

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Yup I noticed that too, that led me to even more confusion. And since they’re irregular I was searching for a lesson about the irregular verbs but that’s not available.

It’s all clear to me now but it might be something Bunpro could add to avoid this confusement for others in the future :slight_smile:

I believe the BunPro team is working on a conjugation tool to help with this (at least it was mentioned some time ago). In the mean time, if you want to practice every possible Japanese conjugation (or as many/few of them as you’d want) there’s a free app called 活用市 (かつようし) = Conjugation City:

There’s also this website:

https://wkdonc.github.io/conjugation/drill.html

HTH!

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Sad day

The website link is really neat tho, thanks!

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That sucks. I’m glad I posted the link to the website though :blush:.

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That’s weird… I have an S23+ with the latest Android installed (13), app works fine for me…

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Guess it’s a time traveler thing 🤷

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What version of Android do you use?

I’m getting the “not available for your device” message on Google Play with Android 13 here.

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I already had it installed on my phone so it probably gives that error only when you haven’t installed it yet.

I just notified the dev of the app about this, hopefully he can fix this.

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Yeah that seems plausible.