Don't do anything! (Unit 1)

You're going to love ichidan verbs because the stem never changes.

For every type of conjugation, all you have to do is stick a verb ending on to it, and you're done.

That's why the verb stems of 食べる (たべる // to eat) and 寝る (ねる // to sleep) — which are 食べ- (たべ-) and 寝- (ね-), respectively — are the same in every form listed on our cheat sheet:

There are a couple of other conjugation forms in which the stems of other verbs don't change, as well.

We've already seen the present tense of the positive plain form, which is the same as the dictionary form. That's when the verb doesn't change at all:

Perhaps you remember that we talked about such verbs in an earlier lecture, in which we saw this dialogue:

Let's talk about something new, though.

There is another conjugation form in which no verb stems change: 禁止形 (きんしけい // prohibitive form)!

When we are commanding someone not to do something, we can just snap a な onto the end of a dictionary-form verb. So, take a verb like 座る (すわる // to sit), snap な onto the end, and you get:

These negative commands are typically used in informal speech. They have the potential to sound quite rude, so please be careful using them. 禁止形 will be covered more in depth in a future JLPT N4 lesson.