て Form For Verbs・Using て Form To Link Actions

Introduction

You’ve done it! You’ve reached what many consider to be the first big grammatical roadblock for Japanese learners: て-form. But don’t worry! I’ll make sure it’s no more of an obstacle than an empty cake box sitting in the middle of the road that you think about swerving around (in case there’s like, a really solid cake inside), but you run it over anyway and it turns out to be empty so you go “screw you cake box! Ha ha ha ha!” as you drive off into the sunset. Mwahahaha! … What was I talking about again?

て Form: What It Be

て-form is a specific conjugation that we can perform on both verbs and い adjectives. To understand て-form, let’s first revisit what the point of conjugation is in the first place.