Japanese godan and ichidan verbs
classification of Japanese verbs with regular inflection into two classes of godan verbs (五段活用) and ichidan verbs (一段活用)
The Japanese language has two main types of verbs: godan verbs, or quinquegrade verbs (五段動詞, godan-dōshi), and ichidan verbs, or unigrade verbs (一段動詞, ichidan-dōshi).
Terminology
Categories are important when conjugating Japanese verbs, since conjugation patterns vary according to the verb's category. For example, 切る (kiru) and 見る (miru) belong to different verb categories (quinquegrade and unigrade, respectively) and therefore follow different conjugation patterns. Most Japanese verbs are allocated into two categories:
Quinquegrade, quinquigrade, quinquagrade or pentagrade verbs (五段動詞, godan-dōshi)
Unigrade or monograde verbs (一段動詞, ichidan-dōshi)
Statistically, there are about twice as many quinquegrade verbs than unigrade verbs.
Classical Japanese had more verb groups, such as bigrade verbs (二段動詞, nidan-dōshi) and quadrigrade verbs (四段動詞, yodan-dōshi), which are archaic in Modern Japanese.
The word grade in quinquegrade and unigrade is translated from dan (段). In grammar, dan is a synonym for retsu (列) and opposite to gyō (行). The translations for dan/retsu and gyō vary, either of them can be translated as "row" or "column" depending on how the gojūon table is laid out, but the distinction is simply that gyō is named after consonants, as ka-row (か行, ka-gyō), while dan/retsu is named after vowels, as in i-column (い列, i-retsu) or i-grade (い段, i-dan). The a-row (あ行, a-gyō) consists the kana a (あ), i (い), u (う), e (え), o (お), which differ only by vowels; while the a-grade (あ段, a-dan) consists of the kana a (あ), ka (か), ga (が), sa (さ), za (ざ), ta (た), da (だ), na (な), ha (は), ba (ば), pa (ぱ), ma (ま), ya (や), ra (ら), wa (わ), which differ only by consonants.
The quinquegrade (五段, godan) class consists of verbs whose inflection forms make use of all five grades, or five vowels.
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