Advanced いる and ～てある: States

Introduction

This lesson is going to be a mix of old and new grammar: some old stuff that I lied about am going to add a bit of... nuance to, and some things you've (probably) never seen before! Let's get started!

いる and ある, but not like you'd expect!

Seeing いる and ある again, you might think this is a review of "there is" for animate and inanimate objects from your Elementary lessons, but nay! Well, partially nay! In this lesson, we'll be discussing two main points:

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  Using いる for inanimate (non-living) things

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  Combining ある with て form verbs

You can think of this lesson as a grown-up version of ～がある/いる if you'd like! Sometimes it's nice to look back and see how much our grammatical knowledge has grown, especially through lessons like this that build upon old grammar.