Hi all,
Silly beginner’s question, but I am having a hard time figuring out which form 〜いる/〜える verbs are from the dictionary. For instance, looking up 覚える in the default macOS app gives the following result (further examples/entries omited):
Am I missing some obvious way in which the verb form is marked? Of course, it can sometimes be inferred from the example sentences (or, in this case, the て形 “variants”), but I guess was expecting it to be stated more obviously.
Thanks!
Well, judging by the screenshot you provided, I don’t see anything that indicates it, either. You could try a different app or a website like jisho.org, instead.
There are a handful of spelling cues you can use, but they’re not absolute. Generally speaking, if you see いる・える (or a mora that includes い・え, like み・め) spelled out in kana, that means it’s 一段, otherwise it’s 五段–except this rule is very inconsistent for words written only with a single kanji and る (e.g. 見る、切る、着る). Here is a more comprehensive set of rules. 覚える happens to be one of the verbs that falls squarely into the 一段 rules.
I strongly second using jisho.org 
Personally I found trying to memorize rules to be not only unhelpful, but harmful. There are lots of exceptions as @wrt7MameLZE33wlmpCAV already mentioned, and the exceptions tend to include many common words.
I know this isn’t quite what you asked, but I saw a tip awhile back that really helped me retain ichidan vs godan verbs as I looked them up. Think of godan verbs as including the English consonant sound in the last mora as part of their stem. Think of ichidan verbs as excluding the entire る. For example, I see 食べる as “tabe-ru”, but I see 走る as “hashir-u”.
One other quick tip – when bunpro gives you a verb to use in a review question, you can usually click the last kana in the verb and bunpro will tell you whether it’s 1 or 5. It’s handy to avoid swapping back and forth between bunpro and a jiten.
The Japanese-English dictionary doesn’t have this (it’s the ウィズダム, which is made for Japanese speakers trying to use English I guess… it does have this kind of information for English words). But if you enable the Japanese-Japanese dictionary (スーパー大辞林), you can get it from there. E.g. for 覚える it says “動ア下一” at the start: 動 verb, ア a-row, 下一 shimo-ichi(dan) = eru verb. The one after that with the 文 symbol is for literary Japanese. And if you click on the 
at the top you can see the pitch accent pattern.
Great tip, thanks. I had tried clicking on the main part of the verbs instead, but to no avail – if there was an UI hint at some point explaining, this, I must have missed it.
Ah, thanks, that’s what I was looking for – I heard the dictionary on macOS was supposed to be quite good, but missed the second entry for the 大辞林, which is at the very bottom of the language selection list.
Another beginner’s question, but what does “a-row” mean in this context? The only references I found were to the kana grid.
The quality is decent, and it’s nice that it’s available pretty much everywhere where there is selectable text. But the content is still made for Japanese speakers, so it’s not always ideal for learners.
I meant to mention it before, but if you’re using Safari a lot then the Safari extension 10ten reader might be useful. It’s a Japanese-English dictionary that’s even more convenient because you only have to mouse over a word. And it does have information like 一段/五段 and transitive/intransitive.
It doesn’t really map that well to the way conjugations are usually taught to people learning Japanese as a foreign language, but I guess the row of the last kana of the ない-stem of the verb?
(In Japanese school grammar, the stem and the inflected ending are split up differently, and it makes slightly more sense to classify words by the row of the first mora of the inflected ending. But even then, e.g. classifying verbs ending in う as わ-row is basically historically grown nonsense at this point.)
Yeah, it’s the base for the particular conjugated form of the verb (which is always the same for 一段, hence “monograde”). The same Wikipedia page I linked previously goes into more detail about native verb classifications. This stuff can make more sense if you know that historically there were other kinds of verbs in Japanese (四段, 二段, and more irregular verbs).
Thanks to both of you for the quick replies!
I think I’ve got a reasonably accurate grasp of the verb form system in modern Japanese, but from that, it seems like having the dictionary form and 一段/五段 given would—irregular verbs notwithstanding—already be unique. Are/were there cases where knowing the stem 五十音 column would add information? It seems a bit odd that dictionaries would waste ink on redundant information, so I might be missing something.
None that I can think of off the top of my head, but maybe this classification scheme makes sense as a teaching tool for native speakers. As a second language learner, I’ve always just thought of verbs as 一段, 五段, or する or くる. The biggest pain for me is trying to remember whether a given single kanji + る verb is 五段 or 一段. I think you get the hang of the rest pretty quickly with sufficient practice.
