すんでいます・住んでいます

This was written on October 25th, regarding the previous night's JCCC FL171 Japanese class ... and that morning's Duolingo daily practice (to keep that streak going, and a good discipline to practice daily).

It was a perfect storm, because by chance, the lesson that morning had a word/phrase in it that it hadn't for a while, and that combined with an aside, throwaway, comment from the prior night's class to make me realise something.

Duolingo screenshot of a correct answer for hearing the japanese phrase my uncle and aunt (in group terms) live in Kyoto.
Duolingo screenshot of a correct answer for hearing the phrase in Japanese "My uncle and aunt" [in group terms] "live in Kyoto" - which includes the word すんでいます

The comment was made during the vocab section of class, not even the grammar section, a week after being introduced to the te iru form, and showed why it is 住んでいます and that I've been using the ている form for ages and haven't recognised it or known why - although I had started to wonder and to feel as if there should be some particles or as if something was missing or off there, but I didn’t know what was wrong, just that it didn’t feel right.  

Of course, it was right, but I didn’t have the grammar knowledge to know why it was.  It is perhaps a bit like the way that it has taken me a while to recognise tai in sentences when I'm checking grammar.  The first time I saw it in a homework quiz, I had it down as wrong, saying I've never seen a past tense/negative conjugations as fucked# up as that.  It was only discussing that grammar with another student and being reminded of the tai grammar we were focusing on that week that saved that (both the grammar storage in my brain, and the points in the quiz/homework).  

The following week, I was again looking at a sentence and again thought "I've never seen a negative as fucked up as..." and my brain said "Yes, you have, and it was last week & it wasn't fucked up, it was the tai form..." and every time, it takes me less time to get to that point.  Positive tai, no problem, but for some reason, negative tai just looks to my brain (especially when trying to spot grammar mistakes for the "is this grammatical or not?" questions) like someone messed up their negative past tenses and... *sigh*.

This sudden and belated recognition of the sundeimasu form being te iru & the reason it means what it does, explains why sensei was so irritated with the course textbook for including advanced grammar pieces in the dialogue practice last night - even with the explanatory note of "this phrase means ..."* - one of the phrases uses the passive and the other uses potential form, iirc, and that's way beyond this course & textbook level.  You can be holding bad grammar** in your head & using it and think other things might follow that pattern, and not know the rules and really mess up.  It's that sort of risk & issue that got me to sign up for the college Japanese course in the first place - because I was making up Japanese grammar rules in my head that fit the patterns I was seeing but with no idea if they were right or not (some were not googleable to check).

For the record (& I think that was one of my first posts on this blog), I had been making up rules to explain Duolingo things that didn’t have an explanation for them such as a direct object and a negative verb not having the を (o) particle, but having は (wa) instead.  The rule that I had invented for that was that although in English, something is always a direct object of a verb even if that verb becomes negative - such as “I did not drink the tea” (an obvious fabrication and highly unlikely statement, but good as an example… ;)) - in that sentence, in English, the tea is the object of being drunk, even when it becomes not drunk.  My hypothesis to explain the behaviour that I saw in Japanese in Duolingo was that in Japanese, however, if you do not drink the tea, it is no longer a direct object of the verb, because you are not doing anything to it, so you can mark it with は or が instead. I had googled on it, but googling on Japanese, particles and は and を and が and negatives turns up thousands of hits, and most are irrelevant or just tell you what the three particles are used for at the most basic and introductory level.


*  Nakama 1, Third Edition, Chapter 10, p395, about being mistaken for an elder sibling and also looking younger than they are phrases.  Look at me actually using a footnote for the sort of thing that they usually get used for, rather than asides and comments and distractions***

** (which is actually good grammar, but without knowing how it is used, it can easily become bad grammar) 

*** Right until that comment, anyway :p

# Technical, ancient Anglo Saxon term for bad grammar.  It may come up again in future, try to keep up.

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