The て-form, or a thousand ways to tear your hair out… until it clicks and seems easy

So, in character 6 of the ever wonderful Nakama 1 textbook, we’re battling with conjugating adjectives, new uses of old particles (に & と especially), including double particles, and rearranging sentences so they stick together or to describe things better (I went to x in order to do y), the correct type of please to use depending on the status of listener and speaker, and then they throw the て form at you on top of all that… (or maybe a little of it is spilling over from chapter 5 & I am misremembering, but there’s a lot in there). 

I am also making an assumption in the title - that after working with the て form for a while and learning the rules and patterns, and using it for a while, it will click.  I am nowhere near there yet, can’t even see it with a telescope! 

That said, while I was looking something else up, I decided to go back through the vocab list to get a list of all the ru verbs and the u verbs in one place, and of all the i and na adjectives in one place (technically 2 each, so four places total ;)).  I was about to skip out of chapter one’s vocabulary section, since it had no verbs (we used desu, which technically is a copula, not a verb) and no adjectives, but did have a bunch of expressions… 

And I cast an eye over the expressions, thinking there may be some adjectives or verbs to grab out of there, and noticed that it has the upper-lower form of please in there (kudasai - ください - 下さい), but was struck by a word that I met months ago on duolingo. It seems strange to think of a single word being an expression, but you can also consider German where they bolt word to word to word to get a ridiculously unwieldy munchkined word, that means something new and cool and that would need a paragraph to capture in English - and even then, maybe, miss the the point.

Speaking of missing the point, back to the expression/word that caught my eye: どういたしまして This means “You’re welcome” or “Don’t mention it”, and is used when someone says thank you, and of course we are properly modest & tell people not to mention it, it was nothing (maybe even “please, don’t mention it”), even if our back is nearly broken & we have disarranged our lives for months to do whatever it was - don’t mention it, it was nothing.  Italian uses prego for much the same thing (although, I suspect, without the false modesty that both Japanese and English English (as opposed to American English, or ‘Murrican*** for short) tend to employ.

But when my eye was caught by どういたしまして, it was because I realised instantly that it had the て form in it & we have been using that form inadvertently for months & it isn’t a strange new thing.

It turns out that it is a bolted together word, worthy of the Germans, with this being the breakdown - there’s a prefix (in this context) and then a verb in there, you can see the breakdown more clearly with the kanji form in the brackets on the line below:

どういたしまして（どう致しまして）

The prefix, どう, is actually a contraction or shorthand for its own phrase:

どう＝どのように（どの様に　＝　どの　よう　に）

That phrase works out as “in what way or manner/how”.  Then the verb is apparently the politer equivalent of our old, irregular, friend suru- so it means to do, although maybe with some wider meanings, or maybe suru has them too and we just haven’t encountered them yet:

致す＝いたす＝する

And we have the polite/distal/distance form of it, because we’re not complete barbarians (or we are and don’t want anyone to know ;) :p. Much easier to ambush them later that way…).

します（いたします＝します）＝＞

And them that polite non-past します form gets turned into the て form

しまして.

So we’ve been using the て Form for months and not known it.  And also for a slightly lesser time, with the joining word I was given for our first essay piece - “soshte”* is how it sounds - and of course, hello, て form!!  I saw it in passing in ch 6 when I was scanning back looking for the rearranging exercise we did & not finding it, must have been in SAM, but I saw it listed as a conjunction, and て is our sticky form so it works perfectly as a conjunction.

* そして **

** Thankfully using kana defeats my English inner 5 year old because of the mental context switch.  I have no defense against them in romaji, so that is another reason why I will rarely include the romaji for things in here.  Go copy & paste it into jisho if you can’t work it out.

*** Most of my online friends stopped referring to American English as “Merkin” once someone pointed out to them that that was a pubic wig… [Don’t believe me?  Go look it up.  I’ll wait… Told ya so!].  Of course, some of them used the term twice as much, but most people tended to use murrican instead.