Casual Form: だ・Verbs (+ Negative)

Introduction

Now that we've successfully made speaking politely your first instinct when conversing in Japanese, I can finally teach you how to use the casual form. Yay! 🎉 I’m so glad we made it this far without being accidentally rude to anyone in Japanese... (We did, right?)

As you already know, casual form (also known as plain form), is a relaxed and familiar way of speaking that you can use with your family and friends. With this lesson, I'll show you how to conjugate verbs into their casual forms, and review their differences from the polite form.

Review of だ and だった

First up in this lesson is something you’ve already been introduced to: だ!

As you know, you can make a Japanese sentence with just a single word and that’s already casual as is. However, you can also choose to add だ if you want to be more declarative or emphatic. (Don’t forget using だ is more common for males in Japan!)