I recently understood something. The ます (masu) form in Japanese is not really a conjugation of the verb. Masu is more like an auxiliary verb. The few readers of this blog who actually understood the previous sentence are probably thinking “of course”, but this idea is really new to me. I suppose it is like the fact that pro-wrestling is fake, once you know its obvious, but well.

This idea started showing its head on monday when my teacher told me that the conditional which is built on the TA-form of verb (informal past) could actually be built on the mashita-form (formal past) as long as there is only one masu-form in the sentence. Thank to Stijn to help my clarify the matter. Basically masu seems to be an auxilliary that raises the politeness level that is attached to i-stem of the verb. In positive form, this “verb” is regular, masu, mashita. In negative form this “verb” seems to be irregular and built on the e-form (imperative): masen, masen deshita.

Like highlanders, it seem there can only be one of them per sentence…