4.14 The て form — and what it connects — Epoché
What you will be able to do Make the ending from any verb, in all three classes. Join two clauses with it, in the order in which the events happened. Make the continuing form, and tell its two meanings apart. Make a polite request. Prerequisites : lesson 4.13 — wanting, suggesting and inviting, which used the same polite stem. If you learn one thing in this volume properly, make it this. The ending is the hinge of Japanese: it joins clauses, it builds the progressive, it makes requests, and in the second phase it will build permission, prohibition, attempts, preparations and regrets as well. Nothing else in the grammar pays back the afternoon so well. Making it is mechanical. Using it has one subtlety, which is in the third section and is the part to read twice. Making it The rule depends on the last syllable of the plain form. Class 2 and class 3 are trivial; class 1 splits five ways, and the five are worth saying aloud as a list until they come without thinking. Class Example Note Class 2 — verbs whose plain form ends in る after e or i たべる → たべて / みる → みて Take off る , add て . No exceptions at all. Class 3 — the two irregular verbs する → して / くる → きて Learn them as they stand. Every compound in する follows the first. Class 1 — う / つ / る てつだう → てつだって / まつ → まって / とる → とって Three different endings, one result: the small っ and て . Class 1 — む / ぶ / ぬ よむ → よんで / あそぶ → あそんで These three voice the ending: んで , not んて . Class 1 — く and ぐ むく → むいて / およぐ → およいで The voicing follows the consonant: く stays voiceless, ぐ does not. Class 1 — す はなす → はなして The only ending that looks like the polite form. It is regular. One exception in the whole system. いく , to go, is class 1 and ends in く , so the rule gives いいて — but the real form is いって . It is the only irregular ending in the language and it happens to be one of the commonest verbs, which is why every textbook puts it in a box. The past plain form uses exactly the same rules with た in place of て : たべた , よんだ , とった . Learn one and you have both. Joining clauses Put the ending on the first verb and the clause is joined to what follows. The order on the page is the order in which things happened, always, and there is no word for and : the ending is the joint. It carries no tense of its own. Whatever tense the last verb of the sentence has applies to the whole chain, which means a Japanese sentence can run four or five clauses before telling you when any of it took place. That is the single biggest difference from English in reading, and it is why you are told to read to the end before deciding what a sentence means. The joint can also mean because . あなたがいなくて、こころぼそい from the sentences below is you are not here, and (so) I am lonely — the English translation supplies a reason that the Japanese only implies. Japanese leaves the relation between the two clauses to be worked out, where English chooses a conjunction and commits itself. When the first clause is a state and the second a feeling, reason is nearly always the reading. To make the sequence explicit, add から : たべてからねた , after eating, I slept. This is the form to use when the order matters and you want to say so. The continuing form, and its two meanings Add います and you have the form English calls the progressive: たべています , I am eating. That much is easy. The subtlety is that the same construction also expresses a state that resulted from an action , and which of the two you get depends on the verb, not on the form. Verbs that describe something going on over time — eating, studying, sleeping, waiting — give the progressive. Verbs that describe an instantaneous change — coming to know, getting married, dying, taking hold of — give the resulting state. So: Japanese What it means たべています I am eating (going on now) かれをしっています I know him — not I am getting to know him くるまをもっています I have a car — not I am holding a car けっこんしています He is married — not he is getting married The plain form of these verbs is not a present tense. しります does not mean I know ; it means something closer to I will find out , and as an answer to a question it is wrong. The ordinary present of I know is the continuing form, and its negative is しりません — which, confusingly for an English speaker, is the plain negative and not the continuing one. That pair is worth memorising as a pair. A third use, which you will meet in reading before you use it yourself, is the habitual: まいにちテレビをみています , I watch television every day. English uses the simple present for this and Japanese can use either, so it rarely causes trouble. Requests Add ください and you have the ordinary polite request: まってください , please wait. It is neither formal nor casual — it is the default, usable with a shop assistant, a colleague or a stranger, and it is what you will say twenty times a day. It is an imperative underneath, softened by the verb for giving, so it is not used upwards for anything substantial: asking your professor to read your draft with this form is brisk. The softer forms are built on the negative question of 4.13, and the honorific ones belong to volume 5. For everything else, this is the form. Dropping the ください leaves a plain request used between intimates and downwards: まって . It is short and warm and easy to overuse; if in doubt, keep the ending. How English does it English joins with words; Japanese joins with endings. An English sentence chooses and , so , because , after or a full stop, and the choice commits the writer to a relation between the two clauses. The Japanese ending commits to nothing except the order. This makes Japanese vaguer in a way that is deliberate and, once you are used to it, comfortable: you are not obliged to decide whether the second thing happened because of the first or merely after it. English marks tense on every verb; Japanese marks it once. In a chain of joined clauses only the last verb carries the tense. English cannot do this at all — I got up, ate and went out puts the past on all three — so a learner reading Japanese keeps trying to