Introduction to Japanese Tenses

The Two-Tense System

In English, we typically think of time in three main tenses: past, present, and future. Japanese, however, operates on a simpler system. It only has two primary tenses: Past and Non-Past.

The "non-past" tense covers both present actions (things you do habitually) and future actions (things you will do). There is no distinct future tense in Japanese. Instead, whether a sentence refers to the present or the future is determined entirely by context or by specific time words like or .

Tense and Politeness

Before looking at how words change, it is helpful to know that Japanese sentences change their endings based on politeness. Tense is applied to both casual (dictionary form) and polite (desu/masu form) speech.

In this article, we will focus on the basic polite forms to illustrate how the tenses shift.

Verbs

Japanese verbs indicate tense by changing their endings. To form the polite past or non-past tense, verbs use the suffix.

The State of Being (Desu)

When you want to say "A is B" (like "I am a student"), you use the state-of-being marker. In polite Japanese, this is . Just like verbs, changes its form depending on whether the statement is in the past or non-past.

(Note: is also commonly used as a slightly more formal version of .)

Adjectives

A unique feature of Japanese grammar is that adjectives also conjugate to show tense. Instead of saying "was cold" by changing the verb, the adjective itself changes. For a comprehensive guide on adjectives, see Introduction to Japanese Adjectives.

I-Adjectives

For I-Adjectives, you change the final to indicate the past tense. In polite speech, you simply leave at the end as a politeness marker— itself does not conjugate here because the adjective already carries the tense.

Na-Adjectives

Na-Adjectives behave exactly like nouns. They rely entirely on (or its casual equivalent ) to show tense.

Study Tips

The concept of a two-tense system is fairly straightforward, but getting used to conjugating verbs and adjectives on the fly takes time.

You do not need to memorize every single conjugation table before moving forward. The most practical approach is to familiarize yourself with the standard and endings so you know what time frame a sentence is referring to when you encounter it.

Once you recognize whether a sentence is past or non-past, the rest is just pattern recognition. You will naturally acquire a feel for these conjugations over time by spending time with the language through A Practical Guide to Language Immersion.

To learn about expressing ongoing actions, habitual behaviors, and resulting states, see Expressing Ongoing States with ている.

For more advanced verb conjugations, including how to express ability (can/cannot), see Expressing Ability with the Potential Form. To learn about expressing actions done to you (the passive voice), see Expressing Actions with the Passive Form.
To explore how plain and past-tense forms connect to hearsay patterns, see Expressing Hearsay and Appearance with そうです.