Lesson 16 · なんで いきますか — going and coming
Three verbs, and every way to go
Lesson 6 taught なんで — by what means? — when the only way to go anywhere was on foot. Today the course gets its first verbs of motion and the whole fleet: nine ways to travel, three speeds of train, and a platform number to find.
Half of this sheet is a calendar you already own — the relative weeks, months and years of lesson 10, and the day-of-month readings of the counter sheet. The other half is new, and it all points the same way: out of the house.
About the verbs on this page
Three verbs arrive today, each with a Roman numeral beside it, and the standing rule from chapter 14 has not moved: learn each word with its ます already attached, as one fixed shape. The numerals are for building a verb's other forms, and this course does not build them yet.
One thing has changed since chapter 14: this time all three markers are right — including the one on かえります, which is the classic place to get it wrong. See section 1.
1.Three verbs, two directions
English chooses come or go by all sorts of habits. Japanese chooses by one test: which way the movement points. Away from the speaker is いきます; toward the speaker is きます. And かえります is not simply return — it is return to your own base: home, your desk, your country.
| Japanese | Kanji | English | Arabic |
|---|---|---|---|
| いきます | 行きます | go — away from the speaker | يَذْهَبُ |
| きます | 来ます | come — toward the speaker | يَأْتِي |
| かえります | 帰ります | go home, return to base | يَعُودُ إِلَى الْبَيْتِ |
Trick 1 · The ます form hides what the kanji keeps
きます is 来ます, comes — group III, the group with exactly two members. But きます is also 着ます, wears, a perfectly ordinary group II verb. Same sound, same polite ending, different word, different machinery underneath. The same happens to いきます, which is 行きます goes and also 生きます lives.
The ます form erases the difference; the kanji carries it. Six chapters running, the dictionary check has made the same point — a short kana string identifies almost nothing — and verbs turn out to be no exception.
Trick 2 · かえります is the trap the sheet did not fall into
Chapter 14's sheet marked おきます with the wrong group. This sheet marks かえります I, and that is the hard call made correctly: 帰る ends in the -eru sound that group II verbs end in, and is group I anyway. It is the standard example of the trap in every grammar of Japanese. A sheet that gets this one right has been checked against something.
2.Nine ways to go
How you go is marked with で — the by-what-means particle you have had since なんで in lesson 6, finally given a fleet to answer with.
バスで いきます。
| Japanese | Reads as | English |
|---|---|---|
| バスで いきます。 | bus-by / go | I go by bus. |
| しんかんせんで きます。 | Shinkansen-by / come | I come by Shinkansen. |
| あるいて かえります。 | on-foot / go home | I walk home. |
The third row is the odd one out on purpose: あるいて — on foot — takes no で at all, because the manner is already baked into the word. It is a fixed shape of the verb walk, learned whole the way みせて was in chapter 13. Arabic happens to build on foot the same way — مَشْيًا is a frozen form doing adverb duty — so both languages answer how? here with a shape, not a phrase.
Trick 3 · One character decides whether you pedal
The course now has three 車 words, and the middle character does all the work: 自動車 is the self-moving vehicle — a car; 自転車 is the self-turning vehicle — a bicycle; 電車 is the electric vehicle — a train.
And 行, the character of 行きます, is hiding twice more on this sheet with its other reading, こう: 飛行機 fly-go-machine, and 急行 hurry-go. One character, two readings, three words on one page.
3.The station, three speeds up
Every train on a departure board is one of three kinds, and the ladder is worth learning as a ladder — each step skips more stations than the one below.
| Japanese | Kanji | English | What it stops at |
|---|---|---|---|
| ふつう | 普通 | local | everything |
| きゅうこう | 急行 | rapid | skips the small stops |
| とっきゅう | 特急 | express | almost nothing |
Trick 4 · とっきゅう is two words, squeezed by a rule you know
特急 is 特別 special + 急行 rapid, clipped to a character each. And the small っ in the middle is not decoration — it is とく's final く collapsing before a voiceless sound, exactly the gemination the counter sheet taught for 1, 6, 8 and 10: とく + きゅう → とっきゅう. A sound rule you learned for numbers, running inside ordinary vocabulary.
The Arabic on the cards makes the same cut: rapid is قِطَارٌ سَرِيع, and express adds خَاصّ — special — which is precisely the 特.
The platform is a counter: 〜ばんせん, built from 何番's 番 number and 新幹線's 線 line. It is the course's ninth, and the counter sheet's first-sound rule scores its cheapest win yet: ば is voiced, so no number ever changes it — いちばんせん, さんばんせん, なんばんせん, straight through with nothing to memorise.
Two cells on the sheet to correct
駅 has slid up a row. The sheet prints it beside スーパー, whose kanji cell should be empty — a supermarket is a clipped loanword with no kanji — and leaves えき's own cell blank one row down. 駅 is station; put it back on えき's row. This is the neighbouring-cell slip again, the same class as day 11's row that filed America under the U.K.
甲子園 is not in Osaka. The sheet says "a town in Osaka"; it is in Nishinomiya, Hyōgo Prefecture, between Osaka and Kobe — near Osaka, not in it. Both JMdict entries place it in Nishinomiya, and so does the famous baseball stadium's own address.
4.The calendar, revisited in kanji
Twenty-four rows of this sheet are words you already own — and the sheet still earns its space, because lesson 10 taught these words as sounds and the kanji column now shows they were a system all along. Three prefixes, three units, nine words:
| 先 last | 今 this | 来 next | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 週 week | 先週 せんしゅう | 今週 こんしゅう | 来週 らいしゅう |
| 月 month | 先月 せんげつ | 今月 こんげつ | 来月 らいげつ |
| 年 year | 去年 きょねん | 今年 ことし | 来年 らいねん |
The bottom row breaks the grid twice, and both breaks are old words refusing to be regularised: last year is 去年 — the departed year — not 先年; and 今年 keeps the native reading ことし where the grid predicts こんねん. The same 今 read three ways — こん here, きょ in 今日, こ in 今年 — is chapter 14's いま character showing its whole range.
The sheet then re-lists the day-of-month readings — ついたち through とおか, plus はつか — all of which live on lesson 10's cards and the counter sheet. Only two dates on the page have never had a card, and they are the two lesson 10's よっか card promised: じゅうよっか, the 14th, and にじゅうよっか, the 24th — the native よっ- surviving up a calendar that has gone regular everywhere around it. Both get cards below. なんがつ, なんにち and いつ are lesson 6's, and たんじょうび is lesson 10's — revision all.
5.The walk
Four scenes, thirty-two words, each in exactly one of them. The route is a journey — which the sheet supplied itself, down to the geography: the four place names sit on the Shinkansen line in exactly the order the walk visits them.
The walk needs JavaScript. Every word in it is on the cards below.
6.Thirty-two words
Four of these are deliberate repeats — えき and ひと from lesson 4, でんしゃ and かのじょ from lesson 7 — carried again because a station scene cannot be walked without its station, and かれ cannot be taught with its pair missing. Their English and Arabic are the same as before; a word met twice is not two words.
The word cards need JavaScript. Every word on them appears in the walk above.
Drill them for meaning
The drill needs JavaScript. Every word it asks about is in the list above.
7.The reply that was owed
One row of the sheet is not a word but an utterance — and it completes an exchange the course opened four chapters ago. Chapter 12 taught ［どうも］ありがとう［ございます］; this sheet finally supplies the answer.
-
1.You're welcome. / Don't mention it.
Japaneseどういたしまして。
dō itashimashite
Arabicعَفْوًا.
ʿafwan
Trick 5 · The sheets keep answering each other
This is the third time a chapter has quietly completed an exchange an earlier one opened: chapter 12's こちらこそよろしく answered chapter 11's どうぞよろしく, and now どういたしまして answers chapter 12's ありがとう. Greetings in this course arrive as halves of a dialogue, one half per chapter — which is also how you will meet them in real rooms: someone else says the first line.
8.Sources
- Minna no Nihongo I, 3A Corporation — 第5課, which this sheet reproduces. Read the book's own 会話 for this lesson if you read one thing: it is one question asked at a station — この でんしゃは こうしえんへ いきますか — and the train ladder, the platform counter and three of the four place names all live inside it.
- Jisho.org, over JMdict/EDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) — every reading, gloss and commonness tag here, checked 2026-08-17. It is what settled that 帰る is group I despite its sound, that きます and ふつう and きゅうこう each have a second common word living at the same kana, that 番線 carries no common tag, and that 甲子園 is in Nishinomiya, Hyōgo.
- The counter sheet — where 〜ばんせん now sits, and whose first-sound rule predicted it would never change before it was taught.
- Lesson 10 and the calendar sheet — the relative weeks, months and years, and the day-of-month block this sheet revises.
- Lesson 6 — なんで, by what means, which has waited ten chapters for today's answers.