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I understand that ～もの converts the verb into a noun. So たべます meaning "to eat"
becomes たべもの meaning "food". Can ～もの be applied to all verbs?

eg. ききます meaning "to listen" becomes ききもの meaning "music"?
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2014-10-30T02:38:47.673
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verbs conjugations nouns
Can ～もの be applied to all verbs to make them a noun?
There _is_ a way that ～もの can be applied to all verbs to "make them a noun",
but it's _not_ the way you're thinking of.

If you have a verb (e.g. 走る【はしる】 "to run") and a noun (e.g. 人【ひと】 "person"),
you can _always_ take the dictionary form (辞書形【じしょけい】) of the verb and put it
before the noun, to get a construction that means something like "[noun] that
[verb]s" (e.g. 走る人 "person who runs"). Since もの is a noun, you can do the same
thing with any verb and もの as well.1 Note, however, that I put "make them a
noun" above in quotes for a reason: this construction is not actually a noun.
Rather, it forms what I guess you would call a "nominal" (thanks,
@DariusJahandarie): a grammatical construction that behaves like noun, but
isn't a noun (kind of like a noun phrase in English).

**However** , words like 食べもの【たべもの】 aren't formed this way. The way we can
tell is that the dictionary form of 食べる【たべる】 is, well, 食べる, not 食べ. Instead,
the word 食べもの is formed by taking the _stem form_ of the verb and putting it
before もの.2 This is not generalizable in the same way that the "dictionary
form + noun" rule is. Only some verbs have a related noun of the form "stem
form + もの". Some examples: 飲みもの【のみもの】 "drinks", 生きもの【いきもの】 "living things",
洗いもの【あらいもの】 "things to be washed [esp. clothes or dishes]".

聞く【きく】, however, is not one of those verbs - ききもの does not mean "music" or
"things one listens to" or any such thing.3 Similarly, 走りもの doesn't mean
anything at all, though you might think it would mean "runner" or something
like that.

Incidentally, if you want to talk about "music", the right word to use is
probably 音楽【おんがく】.

* * *

1 You should be careful about using "[dictionary form] + もの", though - there
will often be a better choice. For example, you _could_ say 食べるもの to mean
"food", but that would be very strange, and people would look at you funny,
and so you should stick to 食べもの instead.

2 When I say that 食べもの is "formed" in such-and-such a way, I am speaking
anachronistically - in modern Japanese, 食べもの is a single noun, not a complex
construction built from 食べ and もの. In other words, "[stem form] + [noun]" is
not [productive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_\(linguistics\)) in
modern Japanese, whereas "[dictionary form] + [noun]" _is_.

3 Okay, I lied for illustrative purposes. 聞き物 _is_ actually a word, but it
doesn't mean at all what you might expect it to mean based on an analogy with
たべもの. Rather, it means ["something worth listening
to"](http://ejje.weblio.jp/content/%E8%81%9E%E3%81%8D%E7%89%A9) (cf. [the same
in a monolingual
dictionary](http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/50979/m0u/)). Furthermore, as
@snailboat points out, 聞き物 is a very rare word - only two hits in the
[Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written
Japanese](http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/), versus over 10,000 for the
more common word 音楽 (which, keep in mind, isn't a synonym). The moral of the
story: be wary about "[stem form] + もの" nouns - not all the nouns that you
imagine might exist actually _do_ exist, and of the ones that do exist, some
of them will not mean what you think they mean
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