Understanding tenses -- the nerd way

[Ziggy]

Hello there!

Recently, I have decided to relearn Japanese, after forgeting it at the age of 4-5. Yeah, strange, I know.

Then a few days ago, while trying to figure out something in Japanese, I thought about my experiences while trying to learn English on 7th grade. (I didn't have any problems at English at all - I mean, I could SPEAK English very well, and write essays and so on as if it was my first language, but I had to go through (tam-tam-tam!) GRAMMER!

That year, 7th grade, I realized that learning past-simple-present-progressive-future-perfect or whatever other tense the class was working on at the time would be a whole lot easier for my technical mind to understand with simple things like:
<the guy who does the action> <to be> <action>-ing

So then I found myself doing something like that for each and every tense in the English language - every time.

Anyway..

So I was thinking, that maybe someone could build a list of formulaes for tenses, conjuration of verbs, etc. and put it here?

I'd be very very happy to get one of those.

[Damicci]

Problem is that Many verbs have A TON MORE conjugations than english verbs. All representing expression of useage. Not sure a better way to explain it but I think it would be very hard to make a list like that. Plus not all verbs conjugate in the exact same manner. Maybe the majority of them do but it would still be a Large list none the less.

[Elizabeth]

This site lists all conjugations structured around the five base forms for each verb type. If you notice anything missing, though, do let us know...:-)

http://www.timwerx.net/language/jpverbs/