"がっこうに行き、それからべんきょうしました。"
Translation:I went to school, and then studied.
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When referring to a series of actions all done in the past Within the Same sentence, only the last verb at the sentence will be turned into past tense. Here this particular lesson teaches us how to connect and string a series of actions into a single sentence. It may be correct grammatically, but speaking in two short sentences like this;
がっこうに行きました。それからべんきょうしました。
makes us sound very unnatural
But what form should we use then? The base form is 行くand 行った. Why was 行きused here instead?
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There are two different ways to join sentences by changing verb endings to mean, essentially 'and'. One way is to put the verb in て form (verb stem plus te base) - がっこう に いって、それから べんきょう しました。- I went to school and then studied. The other way is to use the verb stem plus base 2 of the verb - in this case い (the verb stem of the verb いく - to go) and き base 2 of いく from which we get the original sentence がっこう に いき、それから べんきょう しました - both sentences basically mean the same - in both cases both forms of the verb iku mean "go ....and....." and serve to join two sentences together. Personally, I think both are as common as the other - iki might sound slightly more poetic, if anything.
Thanks a lot.. Didn't know about the "base" way of looking at the verb conjugations. This explains it well : https://www.freejapaneselessons.com/lesson06.cfm
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I was taught that it is the way that Japanese children learn Japanese. The verbs are split into 3 groups - ichidan, godan, and irregular and then they learn the bases that are attached to the stem - so for 行く for instance the first five are か、き、く、け、こ and then the te and ta bases are the last two and then they learn the uses for all the bases and what if any endings are attached to them for other uses. So logical and regular - even the two irregular verbs 来る and する.
So, if I am gonna say: "I used the spoon and ate my food", I can say: "僕はスプーンを使って、僕の食事を食べました" or "僕はスプーンを使い、僕の食事を食べました" PS: I'm sorry if I conjugated 使う wrong.
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No problem. By the way if you want to say "thank you very much' you would say どうも ありがとう ございます。
for the love of god just google tae Kim's guide to japanese grammer. It is very short and concise. It compliments duolingo so well
350 pages is not short. But still, thank you for the information!
For all the important thing in japanese grammar? I hope you're not being serious.
LOL, the responses in this thread... uh, let's just say that as an avid fiction reader, 350 pages is really not that big of a deal, y'all. :P
Where in Tae Kim's guide does it say you can join sentences with a masu stem verb without the masu? I would really like to find this section in the book!
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I feel like you both don't understand Japanese verbs very well. ~masu is a polite Japanese verb ending. It has nothing to do with the verb stem. Perhaps what you are trying to ask is about joining sentences with ～まして instead of the te form or verb stem plus base 2? (using 行くas a model this would be 行きまして、行って and 行き respectively). Presuming you are asking about using the verb ending ~まして to join sentences - yes, this is possible but it is only used for very very formal occasions - for instance, I worked as an interpreter at Japanese Weddings and we would use ～まして and 下さいませ so this should give you an idea of the degree of formality/politeness involved. As for Tae Kim's guide I couldn't tell you anything about it, sorry.
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The verb form used in the first clause here (行き), called the ren'yōkei 連用形 in Japanese, is often called the "masu stem" in English because it's the stem that -masu attaches to. It sounds like it's what you're calling "verb stem plus base 2 of the verb" in other comments on this page?
(Incidentally, in case you don't know this, to have more than one paragraph in a Duolingo comment you need to add two spaces to the end of each non-terminal line.)
Iki is the stem of that verb and in this case, it is used sort of like a conjunction? You can think of it like a this than that type of action form. When you have thr stem form of a verb ans then the sentence goes on like a list with another action directly following, it's a sequential set of actions.
Yay! I was hoping to learn how to connect two sentences and now we finally have a decent example.
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I think duolingo is just trying to show that you can use base 2 of verbs or the te form to mean 'and', and to join sentences together.
それから implies one action following from or after the first action, right? I don't think "and" is as good a translation as "and then" or "so".
I thought the same thing- I think of それから as "because of that/therefore"...
Often times when people complain about a sentence being annoying without the kanji, its kanji that havent been learned in this series yet.
In this case we learned the kanji for school way back in the lessons, so to not have it here IS actually annoying.
Of course, if they used furigana all the time this wouldnt be an issue and you could both read it and learn new kanji at the same time.
Not necessarily, you can often hear "stem of ます" form used to connect sentences during tv broadcasts or news bulletins
行き sounds really formal and "bookish" to me. as a native speaker i would use 行って。another way to say this sentence (and how i would personally say it) is like this:
学校（がっこう）に行ってから勉強（べんきょう）しました。
I believe they made the sentence like that to teach us how to use それから, I guess.
But I didn't know either way to make this kind of sentence so thank you too :3
Why do you drop the それ from それから in your example? Can you also say「学校に行ってそれから勉強しました。」？
You can definitely use the te-form here. It only makes the sentence sound more causal and colloquial
I am a little surprised that you haven't introduced te-verb forms much before now. In the above instance it would have been better to use a 'te' form which would allow you to ditch 'それから' .
You can ditch それから even with 行き here, 行き and 行って are semantically equal in this case, they just give a different feeling (connecting sentences with ren'youkei sounds very bookish and rigid, at least to me).
when you make a sentence that concatenate accions one way to finish the verb is using just its root form
I would normally use the て-form to connect the sentences. Does using the root form make it more casual or polite?
Not necessarily, depending on the level of politeness, the most extreme case is every single verb could all be "upgraded" to keigo all within the same sentence
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Because the last verb is in the past tense and so it sets the tense for the whole sentence.
I put, "I studied after I went to school" Can someone explain why that is wrong? thx
Your sentence is not exactly the same as the one from the exercise. Yours implies only that the act of study came (somewhere in time) after you went to the school. You could have gone to the school AND have returned home AND finally have studied.
The sentence from the exercise though implies a chain of events, one coming just after another.
I understand that was a stem of ます, but how on earth would anyone think that was a past tense?
Because the final verb determines the general tense of the sentence... if I understand the question here.
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What was a stem of masu? You can't have a stem of masu - masu is a verb ending. I'm also not sure what you're trying to ask in the rest of your question.
But we just learned the kanji for gaakoo; why are we suddenly not using it?
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Not sure where you are getting 'you' from. Also the final verb sets the tense for the entire sentence so it should be - I WENT to school and then studied.
Why didn't they use the kanji for school? They already established it at an earlier lesson >::((
Sorry if this question has already been addressed here, but I wonder if the English translation goes against the grammatical no-no of splitting predicates: http://simplewriting.org/worst-punctuation-mistake/
I'm not a native English speaker but it does seem a bit odd to me. Report it, they'll fix it if they deem it necessary.
学校に行き、それからべんきょうしました was not accepted, even though the kanji was taught in previous lessons.
I'm done with duolingo. The fact that '学校に行き、それから勉強しました", which is the answer but with Kanji, is not accepted, is ridiculous. How are we supposed to know when Duolingo wants us to use kanji, especially when their sentences use it (or don't us it) randomly???
Kanji is almost universally accepted in the course, and if it isn't an error report is usually enough to get it added. But if it's a "type what you hear" question, there's an issue with the programming of duolingo which is only set to accept one "correct" answer, and the Japanese language which has multiple ways to "spell" the same correct answer. A contributor explains the problem in the comments in this thread.
