Daily Thread: simple questions, comments that don't need their own posts, and first time posters go here (January 12, 2023)

Not sure about "theoretical grammatical correctness", but in practice only a small handful of combinations are used / will make sense; you can't just slap verbs together willy-nilly.

There are two cases to consider here:

  1. Verbs that can be used as an auxiliary suffix. These can be attached to pretty much any other verb, and modify the first verb's meaning. ~続ける means "to continue doing ~", ~出す means "to start doing ~", ~合う (note: not 会う) means "to do ~ to each other", etc. Jisho usually tells you when a verb can be used like this.

  2. Set compounds. Here, rather than the latter verb modifying the former in an A[B] manner, you've just got an A+B compound. 見失う exists, and its meaning emerges as a combination of 見る's and 失う's, but ~失う isn't used as a general auxiliary.

Relevant old comment chains: one, two.

/r/LearnJapanese Thread Parent