The Gerund or -te form

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The Gerund or -te form

The -te form is a very important part of the Japanese language, playing a role in several grammatical structures. It's used for connecting two sentences. And it also plays a role in progressive tense and when asking for favors.

How To Conjugate It

The chart below shows you how to conjugate verbs in the te-form. Find the character the verb ends in (be careful with る!), drop that character, and then add the ending to the end of the verb. Note the three irregular cases at the bottom of the chart.

る Verbs	Ending	Example	te-form
る	て	たべる	たべて

うVerbs	Ending	Example	ｔe-form
う	って	うたう	うたって
つ	って	まつ	まって
る	って	わかる	わかって
む	んで	のむ	のんで
ぶ	んで	よぶ	よんで
ぬ	んで	しぬ	しんで
す	して	はなす	はなして
く	いて	はいやく	はいやいて
ぐ	いで	およぐ	およいで

Special Cases		Verb	te-form
		する	して
		くる	きて
		いく	いって

	Ending	Exam	te-form
i-adjective	くて	やすい	やすくて
na-adjective	で	すてきな	すてきで

Connecting sentences

The -te form of a verb which does not have a tense or mood combines with other verb forms. It may be formed from the plain past tense by changing the ending -ta to -te. When the -te form is used to link two sentences where it may be translated as "and", the verb at the end of the sentence shows the overall tense of the sentence.

土曜日の朝に東京へ行ました。新しいスーツを買いました。
Doyoubi no asa ni Toukyou e ikimashita. Atarashii suutsu o kaimashita.
On Saturday morning I went to Tokyo. I bought a new suit.

土曜日の朝に東京へ行って、新しいスーツを買いました。
Doyoubi no asa ni Toukyou e itte, atarashii suutsu o kaimashita.
On Saturday morning I went to Tokyo, and bought a new suit.

Other uses

There are a couple of other uses of the -te form. Please look at the chapters containing these constructs.

Progressive tense : -te iru
Asking for permission : -te mo ii
Asking for a favor : -te kudasai

The material on this page has been contributed by several people.

A large part is taken from "Some Notes on Japanese Grammar" and published for your personal use, with the kind permission of Keith Smillie (http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~smillie/)

Comments (9)

Yes. Thanks for catching this.

Sorry, not row but column

line: る|って|わかる|かって - last row should be わかって　isn't it?

First of all, you need to follow the links listed under "other uses" at the bottom of the page.

Also, there is a forum thread written by Shizu-san which teaches many of the uses of the te form. Here is the address of the thread: http://www.studyjapanese.org/forum/2-japanese-language/3692-te-form-lesson

The problem you are probably having is that you want one explanation or translation which will fit all of the different uses, and that simply doesn't exist.

It's still not clear to me how the -te form is used. :(

Alynne-san, thanks for pointing out the typo. It should have been まって, not って, since all the verbs are being spelled in kana in this column; but your kanji spelling 待って is correct.

The original author of these notes was unfortunately not consistent about his names for the two main types of verbs-- here he calls them る verbs and う verbs; in most places he calls them "group 1" and "group 2". The point is that verbs ending in -ru can be of either type, and they inflect differently depending on which type they are. I will add some text to this page and try to make this more clear.

is まつ　not 待って？　it's written just　って。and what' s the difference between the 2 るs??　ありがと....

teisei shimashita.

There are a mistake on ASKING FOR PERMESSION.
It's writen - "moU ii",but it should be -"mo ii"!

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