another nail in the coffin for textbooks
Teaching Japanese is one of those things that I enjoy immensely, but it’s hard to sell my services as being superior or the best use of your time and money when there are so many alternatives out there, like a textbook that claims to teach you everything about ‘must-know Japanese grammar’, whatever that is.
The reality is that you can learn a minuscule amount of grammar and still be a very competent Japanese user, as it is really vocabulary that is going to get you understanding Japanese faster than anything else.
However, a look down the list of any school Japanese program or course will invariably contain many Japanese grammar forms which have almost no use at all in Japanese, written or spoken. At least they will be exceedingly rare and/or never used in the way they are presented.
Te-forms: Useful in some forms, worth skipping in others
One of the things you will learn about te-forms is that they can come everywhere, including on verbs, adjectives and nouns. My advice is to focus on the verbs, but I came across a usage of a te-form which struck me because it is one of the rare times you will see this usage of it, despite it being a big part of a Japanese language program, at least at the early stages.
In this NHK Easy Article on 白川郷, they interviewed a woman from Kyoto and asked her opinion about it:
There we can see the te-form of the いadjective being used to join it to the next sentence, basically translating it as ‘it is beautiful, and like a dream world’. This usage is about as far as it will go, you’re unlikely to see or hear Japanese people stringing more than 1 or 2 of these adjectives/nouns like this to describe something.
If you look closely, you’ll see that there was another adjective before it, きれい, which technically could be joined with a で. So why didn’t they? Well, first of all, this is not what she actually said. It has been made ‘easier’ for NHK Easy, but you can find her apparently real quote in the linked article put at the bottom of the Easy verion:
But the woman from Kyoto is trying to make a specific point, in that she wanted to relate her feelings from the past, but then slips into the present tense. This is a very natural way of speaking and if you followed what the textbook said, you wouldn’t come across anywhere near as nicely as she does.
So by all means, learn these grammar points, but don’t be surprised when you get out there and describe something in a way that a textbook would have you believe is correct, only for Japanese people to be slightly put off by your long sentence that sounds unnatural.
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