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Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - magamo - 2010-12-11
I did casual googling to see how nonnative speakers are learning Japanese. And it seems quite a few people get confused when they run into the grammar point called 連用中止 when it is quite simple and easy if you learn it properly. (連用中止 is the weird structure which can look as if a sentence ended in the middle of a thought like 過去の忘れ物風に乗せ (taken from thurd's question))
Unfortunately it seems pretty much every modern Japanese textbook for nonnative speakers takes too simplistic an approach so sometimes things look harder than they should. In fact, this grammar point has been the topic of several posts in this forum too.
So here is an unconventional explanation of 連用中止 tailored for nonnative Japanese speakers who learned something along the line of te-form and masu-form instead of more standard grammar like 連用形. We'll see what's going on in sentences with 連用中止 and its variants plus why it is considered te-from when it looks exactly like the stem of masu-form.
We begin with a simple sentence with a verb of the vanilla te-form.
漢字を覚えて日本語をマスターするぞ。
(I'm gonna learn kanji and be a master of Japanese!)
As you probably already know, the function of this te-form is to connect two clauses (漢字を覚える and 日本語をマスターする). Most of the time, it indicates a sequence of actions, i.e., one action happens after the other. In this sentence, "learn kanji" precedes "master Japanese." It can also imply a stronger relation than the simple chronological relation. So this sentence might imply that learning kanji is key to native fluency, that learning kanji is the last step in your Japanese learning journey, etc. depending on context.
You can give a looser, lazier, and more informal tone to this sentence by stretching out the particle て:
漢字を覚えてぇー、日本語をマスターする…… かも？
(I think I'll learn the kanji thing, and, you know, master Japanese?)
Actually you can apply this technique to any particle at the end of a meaning chunk. Often native speakers do this when they're looking for words. It works like throwing in filler words such as "like" and "um" in English. So the extreme case is:
漢字をー、覚えてぇー、日本語をー、マスターするぅー…… かも？
This technique (Is it?) is so rampant you can easily learn how to intone the prolonged particles. Just listen to real, unscripted conversations carefully, and you'll soon get the hang of it. The thing is that excessive use of prolonged particles makes you sound like an airhead. And you might want to completely avoid this in formal speech.
Ah, I almost forgot. I said you can do this for any particle. But don't do this at the real end of your sentence. It might make you look something beyond an airhead.
So, when it comes to the te-form we're using in the above examples, there is an opposite technique too. You don't stretch て out. Instead, you skip it. Often you make a pause at the point where て was. It's like silent remnants. So 漢字を覚えて日本語をマスターする becomes
漢字を覚え、日本語をマスターする。
This way, you sound more crisp, concise, and formal than the standard 漢字を覚えて version. You'll come across this more often in written language than spoken language. The meaning is pretty much the same as the basic te-form version. It's much less colloquial and more succinct. The implied relation between the two actions usually becomes weaker, so the simple time-wise sequence is the most likely connotation.
This kind of omission (or reverse filler like an antonym for "like," "you know," etc.) is the 連用中止 I was talking about at the beginning of this post. This is a handy technique in writing when you want to keep your argument vague but still sound like a smart guy! ... anyway, clever use of te-form for a stronger implication and 連用中止 for a weaker relation is key to good writing.
Now you have mastered the handy sentence connection by te-form and its informal, airhead version and formal, pretentious version... almost. Why almost? Because te-form isn't real in the first place.
The verb form we've been using here is called 連用形 in standard terminology. Roughly speaking (and very rough indeed), it's the conjugated form you use when the verb modifies a grammatical portion called 用言. て is a canonical particle you use to make your verb modify 用言 (hence the term "te-form," I guess). So, usually it's the same as the te-form you learn.
The thing is that, just like any other language, Japanese also has kind of slurred pronunciation like "kind of -> kinda." And some slurred versions have completely replaced official ones such as 書きて -> 書いて. This is the 音便 you may or may not have heard of (Well, it's not exactly correct to say 音便 is lazy pronunciation. But pretty much.).
To focus on 連用中止, we don't go into the rules of 音便 here. But that's ok. We've got a fake but quite handy workaround: Make believe 連用中止 uses the stem of masu-form! You can always get the non-slurred version of 連用形 for any verb this way. It's that simple. So, for example, if you want to apply 連用中止 to the verb 書く, you use 書き because you say 書きます. Here is an example:
黒板に難しい漢字を書き、日本語をマスターしているかのように振る舞った。
(I wrote some complicated kanji on the blackboard and pretended I was a pro when it came to Japanese.)
Because this is originally 連用形+て (or te-form), it's almost the same as:
黒板に難しい漢字を書いて日本語をマスターしている振りをした。
So, was 書いて really the same as 書きて? Yes. But if you say 漢字を書きて、日本語を..., you sound like a samurai from a few hundred years ago.
But then, why should I use the proper pronunciation here? Well, maybe you find it easier to swallow this if you consider a similar phenomenon in English. (Warning: I'm not a native English speaker, so the following explanation may be doggy!)
In many dialects of English, the combination of verb "want" and preposition "to" is often pronounced more like "wanna" than "wan two." The 音便 happening to 連用形 was sort of like this kind of lazy pronunciation having a longer history, I think. (Ask a 500 year old guy if this is true.) So 書きて, 言いて, etc. were the correct forms, but as time passes, people started pronouncing them 書いて (skipping the second "k" before "i"), 言って (skipping the second "i" while kind of swallowing the next "t"), etc. And because this type of 音便 has a long history, nowadays it can sound ridiculous to use the proper versions any more.
But as the name of 連用中止 suggests, this te-form without te (!) we just learned always appears at the end of a complete clause. So, 漢字を書き、日本語をマスターしたかのように振る舞った is a combination of two clauses: 漢字を書いた + 日本語をマスターしたかのように振る舞った.
What happens when "want to" appears at the end of a clause because you omitted the following action part? For example:
"But I don't want to!"
Is "want to" pronounced "wanna" or "wan two"? I think you probably always use the proper, non-shortened version if it's at the end of a clause.
The pronunciation change in 連用中止 is pretty much the same. It's always at the end of a complete clause (often with a pause even), so the proper version shows up. It's just 漢字を書きて, 日本語を読みて etc. are sooooo proper that they remind of Japanese of the samurai and ninja era or even older language.
Thou shalt not use the proper version except for 連用中止, for thou wouldst come across as a foreigner who believes samurais are still out there in Japan.
You use masu-form for 連用中止. But the meaning is like a formal version of te-form because it's actually te-form at its core. Now you mastered 連用中止.
Here's a little exercise:
What's the 連用中止 version of the following sentence?
今オーバードライブさせて羽ばたくのさ。 (This is taken from the lyrics thurd posted.)
Yes. You only need to use the stem of masu-form. So the answer is
今オーバードライブさせ、羽ばたくのさ。
The translation of this line is something like "It's about time we went into overdrive and took off!"
This is the first thread I started here, and probably the longest single post I've ever made...
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - kazelee - 2010-12-11
magamo Wrote:and probably the longest single post I've ever made...True dat! Just wish I knew it was regarding something I already learned. Dems be reeall long
Brilliantly illustrated. I kinda noticed this in writing... when I actually do read.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - zigmonty - 2010-12-11
Awesome, just awesome. Thanks for going to such detail to explain this. It's an aspect of japanese that i was already comfortable with in a practical sense, but knowing the reason for the substitution feels a lot better.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - quincy - 2010-12-11
So is 連用中止 the same as stretching out the てs? Does it have an informal and unclear feeling to it?
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - nest0r - 2010-12-11
Very interesting. Thanks for the write-up, magamo!
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - nest0r - 2010-12-11
quincy Wrote:So is 連用中止 the same as stretching out the てs? Does it have an informal and unclear feeling to it?No, it's the opposite.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - Evil_Dragon - 2010-12-11
magamo Wrote:黒板に難しい漢字を書き、日本語をマスターしているかのように振る舞った。あるあるｗ
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - pm215 - 2010-12-11
magamo Wrote:Unfortunately it seems pretty much every modern Japanese textbook for nonnative speakers takes too simplistic an approach so sometimes things look harder than they should. In fact, this grammar point has been the topic of several posts in this forum too.Mm, but my impression is that usually it comes up as "I haven't encountered this before, what does it mean?" rather than "my grammar book says stuff about this but I don't understand it". (I think it particularly comes up in this forum because many people here prefer to dive into native material early and look things up when they need to, and this is one of those grammar points that's a bit hard to locate in a dictionary index.)
I learnt this basically as "in formal contexts you can use the masu-stem at the end of a clause, and it means the same thing as the te-form". So from my standpoint an explanation that includes a digression on onbin is the one that is making things "look harder than they should" :-)
Thanks for the explanation of the history -- my personal preference is to start by learning how things fit together in practice and then backfill it with supplementary information as necessary, so etymologies are handy there.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - zigmonty - 2010-12-11
Yeah, i don't recall ever being explicitly taught it as grammar. I think i just asked a coworker wtf this ます stem was doing in the middle of a sentence and he explained it was basically just the formal version of て form. That's pretty much been the explanation in my head since and it works pretty well.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - iSoron - 2010-12-11
pm215 Wrote:I learnt this basically as "in formal contexts you can use the masu-stem at the end of a clause, and it means the same thing as the te-form". So from my standpoint an explanation that includes a digression on onbin is the one that is making things "look harder than they should" :-)The explanation is actually very simple: In Japanese, you can omit the conjunction, just like in English. The problem is that people don't know that て is a conjunction, and they don't know about 音便, so we have to make long digressions.
Knowing about 音便 and 連濁 also makes conjugations easier. Take the past tense. Here's an algorithm that works for every single verb out there: take the 連用形, attach た, do 音便 and 連濁 as needed, and you're done. Compare this with the typical explanation.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - JimmySeal - 2010-12-11
iSoron Wrote:take the 連用形, attach た, do 音便 and 連濁 as needed, and you're done. Compare this with the typical explanation.Really? Steps 3 and 4 of your 4-step process require as much or more (I'd say more) memorization as the typical explanation, plus you've made it into a 4-step process instead of a 1-step process, so haven't you just made it into more effort while making it sound simpler?
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - iSoron - 2010-12-11
JimmySeal Wrote:Steps 3 and 4 of your 4-step process require as much or more (I'd say more) memorization as the typical explanationSteps 1, 3 and 4 are used in many other conjugations, so it pays off.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - JimmySeal - 2010-12-11
iSoron Wrote:The -te and -tara form can both be very easily derived from the past tense form. Once that's taken care of, steps 3 and 4 don't really have any use do they?JimmySeal Wrote:Steps 3 and 4 of your 4-step process require as much or more (I'd say more) memorization as the typical explanationSteps 1, 3 and 4 are used in many other conjugations, so it pays off.
And while I'm well aware that the 連用形 has lots of applications, forming it and then performing 3 more steps, two of them complicated, seems pretty pointless when, as I said, steps 3 and 4 on their own are more involved than just memorizing how to conjugate the past tense in the first place.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - yudantaiteki - 2010-12-11
I agree. Trying to memorize sokuon and rendaku complicates things further, especially for a beginner. Forming the perfective and -te forms are something you have to do really early in your studies, and I think the "memorize one verb of each type" is the simplest way to go. That's usually what I have my students do -- there's an explanation in JSL that tries to relate the conjugations to the roots plus sound changes, but I usually tell them that if they have a hard time grasping that, they can just memorize one perfective form for each type of verb (a total of about 8) and then apply that rule to any other verb they encounter. It's still simpler than European languages.
If you get into sokuon and rendaku you run into questions why the perfective of 書く is 書いた but the perfective of 買う is 買った (i.e. why isn't 買いた acceptable for 買う as well? Why doesn't the first 書いた get changed to 書った as well?). Why does 伸びた remain but 呼びた has to change to 呼んだ? (Note that I'm not saying these questions have no answers, but it's just a pointlessly complex thing to burden a beginning learner with.)
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - Aijin - 2010-12-11
While it's always good to have alternative explanations and ways to look at things, I agree that textbooks teach this pretty effectively and easily for beginners. All the extra information would just confuse most people, and make it much harder to learn what is really a pretty simple conjugation.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - magamo - 2010-12-11
Aijin. It's not you that decide whether an explanation is good. It's each individual learner. Whatever works is better. Different explanations work for different students. You may or may not have known this, but I'm against grammar based learning in the first place. And I'm also for grammar and recommend anyone who wishes to reach high level to learn grammar extensively at some point. You may think it's contradicting each other. Well, but I think I shouldn't talk about this now. It's gonna be too long.
So, how does your teaching material explain examples like this without teaching 連用形 for 連用中止?
亭主元気で留守がいい。
Every word is super simple. Every grammar point used here is equally simple and basic. And you think it's accurate to say this is the same as the masu stem at the end of clause meaning te-form? Where is your stem of masu form anyway? How does your te-form thing have to do with this? Or do you come up with another fake rule for this? Oh, you mean this is too advanced for a beginner?!
I have no intention of explaining such a basic concept like "conjugation in Japanese" from scratch only to explain 連用中止. [Edit: Sorry for the long, unnecessary rant! I edited it out!] But how do you explain examples like 亭主元気で留守がいい and 何も話さず、ただその場に立ちつくしていた? Are these structures another bunch of "exceptions" which work exactly the same way as the masu stem exception for te-form at the end of a clause? I'm curious to know how your textbook explains these "pretty effectively and easily."
Things are not that simple, Aijin. Textbooks only show things that look simple from their own explanations and steer clear of tons of other stuff on purpose. That's why people feel great when they finish a textbook, only to realize how little they know when exposed to native material.
If your students rely heavily on grammar to learn a language, no matter how intimidating it appears at first, they gotta suck it up. The language they're learning is way more complicated than the most complicated grammar book ever existed. Even linguists are yet to describe a human language in its entirety. Grammar isn't meant to teach someone a language in the first place.
Ahhh, I haven't said even 1/10 of what I'd like to tell you. But this is becoming my second longest post, so I'll just stop here.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - vileru - 2010-12-11
@magamo
What's your translation of 「亭主元気で留守がいい。」? I've been introduced to 連用中止 before, and I was able to answer your exercises correctly. Yet, I can't wrap my head around the sentence above. There seems to be more depth to 連用中止than I first believed.
On a side-note, the following quote raises my curiosity:
magamo Wrote:Grammar isn't meant to teach someone a language in the first place.I think I know where you're coming from, but I don't want to draw any false assumptions. Could you explain it in more detail?
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - magamo - 2010-12-11
vileru Wrote:What's your translation of 「亭主元気で留守がいい。」? I've been introduced to 連用中止 before, and I was able to answer your exercises correctly. Yet, I can't wrap my head around the sentence above. There seems to be more depth to 連用中止than I first believed.You need to learn 連用形 and 形容動詞 to make sense of it. The OP isn't meant to be a complete explanation of 連用中止 etc. If you read it closely, you'll notice it's basically the masu stem kind of explanation with some more background thrown in. It's yet another simplified answer that explains why it looks like masu form when the meaning is the same as te-form. And it's written the way people who already learned the masu stem rule or at least vaguely know what masu and te forms are like. If it were meant to explain everything, it had to re-define what you already know.
Don't get me wrong though. Anything that works for you is good. People came up with various simplified versions of "grammar" for a reason. It'd be best if you didn't even need to read this thread.
As for translation of 亭主元気で留守がいい, it was a cunning example to try her textbook's explanation. I was sure that bilingual textbooks would steer clear of such sentences with all their might because translation doesn't work. It's an example to show that J-E bilingual textbooks are avoiding stuff which doesn't have English analogues.
So my point there was that, since Japanese and English are quite different and linguistically distant, a lot of simple things must be left unexplained in her textbook. If she thinks it explains 連用中止 very effectively and easily, I think it's a false impression.
As for the grammar point in the sentence, it's also an example to show that the 連用中止 is a universal usage among verb-ish words in Japanese (元気で part is the 連用中止 for a non-verb word). There are verbs (動詞), adverbs (形容動詞), and some other verb-ish words which I forgot English translations like 助動詞. (By the way, I kind of doubt your textbook treats 形容動詞 the way it can have 連用形 like a verb. Probably it's called na-adjective or something.) These verb/verb-ish classes all have 連用形 and the same 連用中止 usage. The meaning etc. of 連用中止 are the same across the classes.
So to understand the sentence, maybe a radically different approach than simplified grammar or translation is necessary.
Oh, and this example IS cunning because it defies translation. But it's NOT strange or anything. If you google it, you'll get 78,000 hits even with quotes, i.e., there are that number of the exact same instances on the internet.
vileru Wrote:On a side-note, the following quote raises my curiosity:Do I make this post longer when it's already too long? Anyway,
magamo Wrote:Grammar isn't meant to teach someone a language in the first place.I think I know where you're coming from, but I don't want to draw any false assumptions. Could you explain it in more detail?
1. Prescriptive grammar can die in a fire,
2. Descriptive grammar is to describe a natural language, examine it, understand human's nature, investigate relations between languages and cultures, study language evolutions, etc.
3. You can use those scientific results to help learn to speak a language, but the hypothetical complete set of grammar rules isn't there for you to learn to speak the language,
4. What you are learning as grammar may be extremely simplified to the extent that it became useless or harmful to SOME people learning a language. But it might work wonders for you,
5. So take whatever you find useful and move on,
6. because no grammar rule explains things perfectly,
7. I mean, you can take advantage of grammar which is less wrong but more complicated. And you can also learn from extremely simplified versions because they're easier to digest. There is a middle ground too.
8. It's highly unlikely that grammar of a language is simple enough to be useful for foreign language education. And if you simplify the humongous monster to be digestible for non experts, you must throw away the vast majority of information, resulting in something I wouldn't like to call real grammar,
8. Is this list enough?
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - yudantaiteki - 2010-12-11
Will you tell us hapless non-natives what 亭主元気で留守がいい means at some point? (I know it has something to do with marriage but I'm not entirely sure how this is supposed to show that regular grammar is wrong; it looks to me like a sentence that is hard to understand without particular cultural knowledge, but what is grammatically unusual about it? Of course textbooks can't cover every last little cultural phrase that a native speaker would know, and it's unfair to expect that they would.)
Magamo, have you ever taught Japanese to non-natives? You have to pick some way to do it; it sounds like you're just talking ideals but that your ideas can't actually be put into practice in the classroom.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - magamo - 2010-12-11
yudantaiteki Wrote:Will you tell us hapless non-natives what 亭主元気で留守がいい means at some point?Everyone will be able to understand the kind of sentence eventually as long as they keep learning. I don't think translation work well, and I'd like to see what Aijin would say before I discuss the sentence further. Besides, a full explanation of 連用中止 would require a huge amount of grammar because I'd have to begin with what 形容動詞 is and it's conjugation.
yudantaiteki Wrote:I'm not entirely sure how this is supposed to show that regular grammar is wrong; it looks to me like a sentence that is hard to understand without particular cultural knowledge, but what is grammatically unusual about it?As I said, the grammar point I was referring to in the example is that 連用中止 has the same meaning and usage across the verb and verb-like classes, which I don't think is normally taught. Besides, 形容動詞 itself isn't a popular notion in Japanese as a second language, is it?
I'm not saying learning the concept of conjugation is necessary though. If it works, anything is ok. Like I said, it's not a teacher that decides whether an explanation is good. It's his students.
But I should point out that those examples are taken from a post where a native speaker is explaining grammar to another native speaker who was wondering the underlying theory of certain similar sentences, which happened to be a question about 連用中止 in grammatical sense. And the more knowledgeable native speaker listed several sentences with 連用形 including 亭主元気で留守がいい and ones with the masu stem version along with some explanations. And the questioner was, "Ooh, I see."
I wouldn't say it's definitely necessary to show they're the same so nonnative speakers can also feel that they're the same. But I wouldn't think treating them as unrelated things is the best explanation in the world either.
yudantaiteki Wrote:Magamo, have you ever taught Japanese to non-natives? You have to pick some way to do itIf it counts to teach foreign students at my former workplace outside their formal curriculum, yes. If it doesn't, I have no interested whatsoever in teaching a foreign language in a class.
yudantaiteki Wrote:it sounds like you're just talking ideals but that your ideas can't actually be put into practice in the classroom.I don't think ideal learning can happen in a classroom at all. I wouldn't take a language course if I were to learn a new language. Why should an ideal learning be in a classroom?
Speaking of an ideal teacher, in my opinion, it'd be a person who has learned various kinds of grammar including the ones tailored for nonnative speakers and is following the current linguistic development (not only applied linguistics) fairly well so that he can adjust the teaching method and kind of grammar flexibly according to his students' needs. The worst kind of teacher is a person who forces his students to apply one particular method/style of grammar/learning theory even when they're not working because the teacher doesn't know other ways.
As I said many times, It's not you that decide whether an explanation/learning style is good. It's each individual learner. The ideal teacher would provide the most effective method for each student. This doesn't happen in a large classroom unless he handles his class really really really well. And I don't believe such excellent teachers and courses are easily available, especially in a classroom setting.
Then again, if a classroom works for one student, then it is a very good teaching method for him. So I don't think classes are necessarily bad. It's just I wouldn't take a language course or hire a teacher who can't adjust students' needs very well.
It's quite hard to explain this in a short forum post, but I personally think that explanations are to ease the uncomfortable feeling of things not being logically explained. I don't think they're for directly helping learners become fluent. It only satisfies learners' inquisitive mind or cures the insecurity of people who need some kind of authoritative answer. It may deepen understanding of a language by increasing declarative knowledge. But I'm not sure if it's important to second language acquisition for everyone.
I don't demand an explanation when I already understand the meaning of a sentence. I know some people want them regardless. And it can be beneficial, I guess. But I prefer to be sure that A means B because people I like and respect all say A when they mean B, not because some authoritative figure says A shalt mean B. So grammar means nothing to my language study in this sense.
Different methods work for different learners, and you can disagree with me. If you and your students are making progress at a satisfying rate and are achieving your goals, nothing can be better.
Edit: So if you have read this, you might realize that I don't think my own explanations posted on this forum would directly help every learner. They might work for some people. They might ease the uncomfortable feeling. But they may be pretty useless. I'm not saying what I'm doing here is better than what you're doing in your classroom in an absolute sense if that's what you thought.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - nest0r - 2010-12-11
Well, I appreciated the explanation, for its own sake. It was relatively simple, covered nuances I hadn't seen before, and is flexible.
Also, I just got an intense craving for like, a waffle cone.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - yudantaiteki - 2010-12-11
magamo Wrote:Are you trying to act like a jerk? I would be pretty embarrassed to go on a forum for people learning English, use an idiom I knew many people wouldn't understand, and then refuse to explain it to learners.yudantaiteki Wrote:Will you tell us hapless non-natives what 亭主元気で留守がいい means at some point?Yes. Everyone will eventually as long as they keep learning. Do you think there is a popular sentence in a language which non-native speakers would never understand?
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - magamo - 2010-12-11
yudantaiteki Wrote:It's not an idiom though? The reason it defies translation is not entirely because there is a huge cultural gap either. It's a normal sentence with normal grammar. It's an example which I think can't be explained "pretty effectively and easily."magamo Wrote:Are you trying to act like a jerk? I would be pretty embarrassed to go on a forum for people learning English, use an idiom I knew many people wouldn't understand, and then refuse to explain it to learners.yudantaiteki Wrote:Will you tell us hapless non-natives what 亭主元気で留守がいい means at some point?Yes. Everyone will eventually as long as they keep learning. Do you think there is a popular sentence in a language which non-native speakers would never understand?
Do you think it's a set phrase having unusual grammar?
Edit: Ah, I noticed I screwed up the part you're referring to in your quote. I was editing my post many times before posting and forgot what your post was like. I didn't mean to respond to your "what" by "yes"! I'm sorry if I offended you. It was, err, a serious typo. I'll edit that part.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - yudantaiteki - 2010-12-11
It looks like the normal -te form of the copula to me, which is fully explained by the textbook I use. But I can't say for certain because I'm not sure I fully understand what the phrase means, and you're apparently unwilling to explain it -- I have no idea why.
Unconventional explanation for te-form: 連用中止 and its handy variations - zigmonty - 2010-12-11
yudantaiteki Wrote:Yeah... i have to say magamo, that while i don't understand the sentence, i get the feeling that it's not the grammar that i'm missing. Are you trying to say that 元気で is the 連用形 of 元気? If so, i think you'll find we all already know that, it's usually called the て form of a na adjective and is taught rather early. If not... well, you didn't make your point very well... Unless it was that you know more japanese than we do, which sorta wasn't really in question anyway.magamo Wrote:Are you trying to act like a jerk? I would be pretty embarrassed to go on a forum for people learning English, use an idiom I knew many people wouldn't understand, and then refuse to explain it to learners.yudantaiteki Wrote:Will you tell us hapless non-natives what 亭主元気で留守がいい means at some point?Yes. Everyone will eventually as long as they keep learning. Do you think there is a popular sentence in a language which non-native speakers would never understand?
Random search found this explanation:
Quote:うちみたいな家庭の事でI have to say that was pretty close to what i was guessing. And i fail to see where the difficult grammar is in this. It's clearly an idiom that has meaning beyond the literal.
亭主は元気に働いて金だけ稼いでくれば家になんか
いなくてもいいってことです。
侘びしいモンです。