Thread: Te Form
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masaegu (Offline)
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Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Central Tokyo
09-25-2007, 08:49 AM

Quote:
Originally Posted by DietWeebs View Post
My teacher taught me this.. Ku i Gu i Su shi Mu n Bu n (etc i forget)

but that an action verb ending the uppercase letters (Ku, Gu, Su, Mu, Bu,) are all dropped when making a TE form and the lower case letters (i, i, shi, n, n,) are added at the end along with TE to make a TE form... does that make sense ?

Is there an easier way to remember this ?

This formula looks very interesting and I've certainly never seen it before. Surprisingly, it does work with many of verbs that I've just tried. But I have a few questions/comments.

1. When you say 'te form', do you include the 'de form'? Let us take the verb 'nugu' (to take off clothes) for example. According to this formula, you will have 'nuite'. In reality, however, we the native speakers of Japanese never says 'nuite'. We will all say 'nuide'. The same goes with verbs like 'yomu = to read', 'shinu = to die', 'kogu = to row a boat', etc... We say 'yonde', 'shinde', 'koide', etc.

2. The formula talks about upper case and lower case, but when would you ever expect to see an upper case letter in the middle of a Japanese verb written in romaji?

3. Suppose one comes up with a perfect formula (and I'm actually starting to feel that it may be possible with only a few exceptional verbs. ), could the Japanese learner carry it in a corner of his brain and make the te and de forms before he verbalizes them? I highly doubt that one could do it because one has to conjugate verbs all the time as in any other language, let alone the te and de forms. I would suggest that you say all the conjugated forms out loud repeatedly every time you learn a new verb...so that verbs incorrectly conjugated will sound 'foreign' to your own ear.

Last edited by masaegu : 09-25-2007 at 09:12 AM.
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