I'm using my japanese coach to study japanese. It does a good job expanding vocab and teaching kana (maybe even kanji, i just didn't get to the stage) but does a HORRIBLE job explaining what's what. Right now it's CONSTANTLY mentioning these bases, but doesn't explain what they are needed for and how to use them. I care mostly for te and ta because it friggin IDOLISES them atm. For both your and my convenience, explain it as if i were a child.
Another thing I'm very interested is someone to help me more privately. Namely via msn. I'm pretty sure this isn't the forum for such a request. I don't know where to post such a request. I apologize for this mistake right now. I would appreciate if you were to point me to the correct forum for this. If you still would like to help me via msn, please post your address as apparently I'm too newb here to post mine.
Um, please consider the possibility that some of the people reading your post might not be very good at reading English. Numbering questions and keep them short always makes them easier to understand.
You should check out text books for learning basic grammars, for my own benefit I'll explain some part of it here though(I got to write something everyday for improving my English).
Web resource:
Compound Sentences - Tae Kim's Japanese grammar guide
Various uses of the te-form - Tae Kim's Japanese grammar guide
て or Te
This particle or verb form play many different roles.
But the one you are likely to see often is probably a verb form called Te-form of a verb.
Like English verbs have bare forms -such as learn, sleep and eat- and past tense -learnt, slept and ate-, Japanese verbs have different forms. Albeit, Japanese verbs not only change forms for different tenses but also for different purposes they are used, verb conjugation.
Te form of verb is one of conjugated forms of verb and mainly used for the purposes of making a request or expressing sequential actions or events. The former is quite obvious but the later could be rather perplexing for speakers of other languages.
"I eat, drink and sleep."
This statement does not mean the person is proposing to do 3 things at once but one after another. Yet, we only deduce so because English grammar rules dictate that and in other languages, the same syntax, the order of presentation of words, and grammar, association of words and their forms, could signify doing 3 at once. To make an equivalent sentence of the above, we use Te-form of verb in Japanese: with bare form of verbs, the meaning of the sentence made can be pretty arbitrary.
Also, "I have been working in this company for x years and now"
This sentence involves resultant state of "having been doing something", this sort of concept associated with time and continuation can be conveyed using Te-form of verb in Japanese.
Hmm, I've ran out of time and energy now.
Read the rest off text books please. The whole stuff is rather too complicated to explain here.