～ために "For the purpose of..."

Introduction

In order to become more 上手じょうず at 日本語にほんご, you'll need to get groovy with this lesson. In fact, this lesson may be the reason that you become a Japanese master...

Today, we'll look at 「ため」 and how it's used to discuss goals, purpose, and cause. Leggo!

Who the heck is Tammy? Oh, it's ため? MY BAD!

Structure

• 

  Nounのため (に)

• 

  な-adjectiveなため (に)

• 

  Verb/い-adjectiveため (に)
  Example:
  → ピザを食たべるために、なんでもするよ。
  ”I'll do anything in order to eat pizza.”

Contrary to popular belief, ため is not a contraction of "hot tamale"!

ため (為ため when written in kanji), is a noun that has many different possible definitions, including: "advantage/purpose/benefit/consequence/regarding". Thankfully, for our grammatical purposes, we can generally categorize ため into meaning either "for (X purpose)/in order to x", or "due to X/as a result of X".