Japanese verbs in TAI form

You Japanese verbs in the form TAI-  たい are used to express the desire to carry out a specific activity. Because of this, this form of verbs in Japanese uses a lot of action verbs.

Japanese verbs in TAI form

The present tense and verbs in tai form

To use the tai form of Japanese verbs in the present tense, just conjugate the verbs in the form ます, the formal present tense of Japanese verbs, and change the extension ます by extension たい.

To learn more about Japanese verbs in masu form, read the article: The masu form of Japanese verbs.

For example:

買います will come 買いたい

書きます will come 書きたい

教えます will come 教えたい

待ちます will come 待ちたい

After we learn to conjugate Japanese verbs in the present tense of the form たい, we will use it as a reference to perform the conjugation of verbs in all other verb tenses. So let's use the present tense in the form たい to conjugate the verbs in the negative present, past and past negative.

japanese verb x adjective

A curious thing I found when studying form たい, is that some authors classify this form of verb as an adjective, and not as a verb itself. To me, this seems like a very strange concept, but it makes the Japanese language even more fascinating.

Another curious thing is the conjugation of these verbs, which in Japanese ended up being the same as the conjugation of Japanese adjectives ending in i.

If you would like to know or review the conjugation of i adjectives in Japanese, click on the link below:

Japanese grammar and adjectives i.

Japanese past in tai form

Following the rule of adjectives, to conjugate a Japanese past tense, using the form たい, just change the い end of the form たい per かった. See just the examples below:

行きたい will come 行きたかった

見たい will come 見たかった

The negative present of the form tai

To put a Japanese verb in the form たい in the negative present, just switch to いend of this affirmative of the form たい by termination くない. Thus, we will have:

行きたい will come 行きたくない

見たい will come 見たくない

The negative past of the tai form

The negative past of form くない is done by changing the い end of present by termination くなかった. Below are more examples of this conjugation of Japanese verbs.

行きたい will come 行きたくなかった

見たい will come 見たくなかった

Using verbs in tai form

To complement the article, I'll leave some examples of using Japanese verbs with the form たい. In future articles, I'll explain better how to use the form. たい to talk about wanting to do something.

テレビを見たいです。

私はこの新聞を読みたくないです。

僕は新しい車を買いたかった。

僕は水を飲みたい。

またね！

Below, see an explanation of Japanese verbs in TAI form in a video:

Kanji calligraphy exercise

Below are the Japanese ideographic symbols used in this article. Selecting the desired kanji, copy and paste them into Worksheet for Kana and Kanji Practice , a new window will open where you can view the printable file and practice Japanese calligraphy by covering the gray symbols and then trying to write yourself. Just print and practice.