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Lesson 72: The Great Connector

[Video Link]

Today we're going to talk about one of the most versatile aspects of Japanese structure.

It covers a number of areas that can be compared to other aspects of Japanese structure and it'll make life a lot simpler if we make those comparisons, so that's what we're going to do.

This is something that isn't really explained well by most textbooks, largely because they don't recognize the verb-stem system, which is absolutely central to the way Japanese verbs work.

So, what it is, what we are going to talk about, is the i-stem of Japanese verbs.

In Japanese this is called the "ren'youkei", which means the "connective use form".

And we might call it "The Great Connector", because it does a whole range of different connecting jobs, which we're going to talk about now.

In English it's sometimes called the "masu stem", which is not inaccurate because of course it does, among many, many other things, connect the helper-verb "masu".

I don't like this expression because it stems from the whole ecology where the so-called masu-form of verbs, which means verbs shifted into the i-stem and having the "masu" helper verb attached to them, were the base-form of verbs.

It's not the base-form of verbs.

It's just verbs with one among many other helper-elements attached to them.

And if we think it's the base-form of verbs we're going to get very confused about what verbs are and how they work.

And I've done a video about that, so if you're in any doubt about all of this, you might want to watch that.

So, what is this i-stem, this "ren'youkei" and why is it so important?

Well, obviously, what it is is simply the verb shifted from its base u-row form to the i-row.

So that ku-ending verbs end in -ki, su-ending verbs end in -shi, and so forth.

Because this is such a wide-ranging structural element, I'm going to compare it to a couple of different things.

The first thing, the most obvious thing, to compare it to is the other three verb-stems.

It's similar to them, of course, because like all of them, it is used for attaching fundamental helpers.

And by fundamental helpers I mean the things that sometimes get called "conjugations" in the textbooks.

As we know, there is no such thing as conjugation in Japanese.

There are just the four stems and various helper verbs, nouns and adjectives, some of which get arbitrarily called "conjugations", some of which don't, and depending on which textbook you read, you'll probably get a slightly different take on which ones are "conjugations" and which aren't, which is perfectly natural because it's a wholly arbitrary category anyway -- there's no such thing as conjugation in Japanese, so the whole thing is fantasy.

And we don't necessarily expect consistency in fantasy.

So, the i-stem, as we know, connects the "masu" helper verb.

It also connects a variety of what we may call dedicated helper nouns and helper adjectives.

Generally, if we're going to attach a helper adjective or a helper noun to a verb, we're going to attach it to the i-stem.

This isn't absolute, but it happens nearly all the time.

As we know, the helper adjective -nai attaches to the a-stem, but that's unusual.

So, we can attach a variety of helper adjectives to the i-stem.

For example, I'm going to take the verb "yomu" as our model for most of what we're doing today.

So let's take the verb "yomu" and turn it to the i-stem "yomi" and we can attach adjectives like "yasui": "yomiyasui" (easy to read), "nikui": "yominikui" (hard to read).

We also attach things like "nagara".

"Nagara" means doing one thing while doing another, so we can say "arukinagara yomu" or "yominagara ongaku-wo kiku": so that's "while walking, I read", "while reading, I listen to music".

The "sou" helper, which gives us the meaning of likeness, that also is attached to verbs with the i-stem.

So we say "ame-ga furisou da" (it looks like rain) and I've talked about this "sou" form and various related structures in another video, which I'll link.

Now, this shifts into the area where we can start to compare the i-stem, the "ren'youkei", the Great Connector, to the te-form.

Now, the te-form is the other great connector, of course.

It connects all kinds of things.

The i-stem is an even greater connector: it can connect most of the kinds of things that the te-form also connects and it can do a lot else beside.

So, with the te-form we often connect helper verbs that are not dedicated helpers, that have a life of their own outside their helper capacity. So we say "mottekuru", which means "fetch" (hold + come); we can say "yattemiru" (give it a try, literally do + see).

Now, in the same way we can produce compound verbs with the i-stem.

For example, we say "furimawasu" (wave around).

And to return to our friend "yomu", we can say "yomihajimeru", which means "start reading" or "yomikomu", which means read + pack in, which actually means "load" in the computer sense.

And I've done a whole video on this "komu", which you can watch if you're interested.

I'll put a link above and in the information section below along with everything else.

On a computer loading screen, you'll often see "yomikomichuu", which is interesting, because here you see we have two i-stems, stacked together.

"Yomikomu" itself takes the i-stem and connects to "chuu" (middle).

So "yomikomichuu" is literally read + pack in + middle -- "in the process of loading".

And this, of course, is a noun: "chuu" is a noun and any compound takes on the character of its last element in Japanese.

So, "yomikomichuu" is a noun formed by a compound of two i-stem verbs and a noun.

And this leads on to something that the i-stem can do that the te-form can't.

And that is, join verbs to nouns to make new nouns.

So, for example, we have "nakimushi": "naki" is the i-stem of "naku" (cry), "mushi" means "insect".

So "nakimushi" is a "cry-bug", which is the Japanese term for a crybaby.

And to come again to our friend "yomu", we can have "yomikata": "kata" means "form, or manner, or way" -- you may have heard of "kata" in karate, the martial art -- so "yomikata" means "form or manner or way of reading", and what this usually means is the pronunciation of a kanji, the way of reading the kanji in a particular context.

So, the i-stem has the compound-word capacity of the te-form and takes it further than the te-form.

And it can also take on another of the te-form's fundamental functions, because, as we know, the te-form can connect the two halves of a compound sentence.

We could say "omise-ni itte pan-wo katta".

So we have two logical clauses there: "I went to the shops" and "I bought some bread".

And instead of using "and", the way we do in English, we use the te-form.

I've done a video about compound sentences, which I'll link.

Now, the i-stem can do exactly the same thing.

We can say "omise-ni iki pan-wo katta", which is exactly the same as saying "omise-ni itte pan-wo katta".

We don't hear it quite so often, but it's not uncommon at all.

We'll see it more in written form, but if you're doing any immersion at all, if you read books, if you have text-heavy games, and in manga and anime, you will come across this i-stem joining of compound sentences.

It's another fundamental piece of Japanese.

So you see the i-stem can do most of what the te-form can do.

With compound words it doesn't compound the same words as the te-form but it compounds words in very much the same manner.

But the i-stem doesn't stop there.

It can do one other thing which is very important.

It gives us the noun-form of verbs.

We've talked before about what's sometimes called nominalizing verbs, that's to say using the -no or -koto or some other means to bundle something verbal into a noun.

Now, this isn't really nominalizing verbs, which is why I tend to avoid that terminology, because what we're actually doing here is not turning a verb into a noun but turning an entire verb-clause into some kind of a noun.

We're not actually turning it into a noun.

What we're doing is bundling it into a box created by a pronoun like -no or -koto, and I've talked in various places about putting verb-clauses into a no-box or into a koto-box.

In some cases, of course, we may also be bundling into that pronoun literally a single verb, so if we say "oyogu-no-ga suki da", we're saying "I like swimming", and that means "I like the activity of swimming".

But, again, this isn't what the i-stem does.

What the i-stem does is give us the true noun-form of a verb.

And in English it's usually represented by the unchanged verb, so that the verb-form and the noun-form are identical in English.

In Japanese they're not identical.

In Japanese we have the base-form, the u-ending form, of the verb for verb and for the noun-form we have the i-stem.

So, let's take an example so you know what I'm talking about here.

In English we have "rest", the word "rest", which can be a verb or a noun.

We use the verb "rest" when we say "I need to rest".

We use the noun "rest" when we say "I need a rest".

So, if we take the verb "yasumu" in Japanese as a kind of rough equivalent to "rest" in English, we have "yasumu", which is the verb "rest", and "yasumi", which is the noun "rest".

So, "yasumu" is the action of resting, the verb "rest"; "yasumi" is "a rest", the noun "rest".

And we use this both on its own and in compounds like "natsuyasumi", which means "summer vacation" or "summer break".

And, we see, we wouldn't call it the "summer rest" in English, but that's because, as we've discussed before, it's very rare for a Japanese word to cover exactly the same area of the meaning spectrum as an English word.

So the word "yasumi" can mean "rest" literally as in lying down, taking a rest; it can mean being off school or off work because you're sick; it can mean a vacation, like "natsuyasumi".

But the point is that the verb-form is "yasumu", the noun-form is "yasumi".

And just about any verb that can have, logically, a noun-form will have that noun-form represented by the i-stem of the verb.

And very often these will be the same thing in English; sometimes they will be different.

So, for example, "itamu" means "hurt"; "itami" means "pain".

Again, we have the noun-form of "hurt", which is "pain".

And this is very important because not only does it give us this whole range of verb-formed nouns, but also it plays a role in other structures which are very rarely explained by the textbooks.

So if we say, for example, "omise-ni pan-wo kai-ni iku" or "kouen-ni asobi-ni iku", what do we mean by the i-stem of "kau", which is "kai", or the i-stem of "asobu", which is "asobi"?

What we mean is the noun, so when we say "kouen-ni asobi-ni iku", we're marking the locational target of the place we're going -- we're going to the park, "kouen" -- and then we're stating our purpose.

Our purpose is the thing of playing, the thing of having fun, and that is "asobi".

So literally we're saying "I'm going to the park for play".

If we say "omise-ni pan-wo kai-ni iku", we're saying "I'm going to the shops for bread-buying".

This is how these are structured, and I think very few textbooks actually ever explain that what we're using here is the noun-form of the verb.

And that's important, because as I taught in our lesson on the logical particles, the five main logical particles can only be attached to nouns.

So if it's not explained that the "asobi" here and the "kai" here are nouns, I'm not sure what most learners think the structure actually is.

And we'll find in various structures that the noun-form of a verb is used and the structure only really makes sense if we understand that it is the noun-form of the verb.

So here we have the i-stem.

It's the Great Connector and it's also the fundamental noun-of-a-verb-forming stem.

So it has a very wide range of applications.

It does all the kinds of things a regular stem can do, it does all the kinds of things that te-form can do, and it creates nouns out of verbs to be used as regular nouns like "itami" (pain) or "yasumi" (a rest/some rest) and also for deeper structures like "asobi-ni iku" (going for play, going for the activity of play).