Lesson 9 of 12
Sequence Lab — three slots, and none of them your choice
about 10 minutes
After this lesson you can
- Say that one thing happens before or after another, choosing the right plain form for each.
- List two things you did without claiming they were the only two.
Words this lesson teaches
- まえに
- before — always after a dictionary form
- あとで
- after — always after a plain past
- みがきます
- brushes, polishes
- は
- a tooth, teeth
- さんぽ
- a walk, a stroll
- ねます
- goes to bed, sleeps
What it explains
まえに and あとで, and why one of them looks wrong
「ねる まえに はを みがきます」 — before sleeping, I brush my teeth. The sleeping has not happened, so the dictionary form is unsurprising. 「たべた あとで さんぽします」 — after eating, I take a walk — puts a past form in front of a present-tense sentence, which looks wrong and is not. あとで describes the eating as finished relative to the walk, not relative to now. The tense of the whole sentence is decided by the last verb, as always.
〜たり…〜たり: two examples, not a complete list
Take the plain past, add り, do it twice, and finish with する: 「よんだり かいたり しました」 — I did some reading and writing, among other things. That last part is the whole point. Listing with the te-form — 「よんで、かきました」 — says those two happened in that order. たり says these are examples of how the time went, and a Japanese speaker will hear a claim you did not make if you use the wrong one about a weekend.
The scene itself is in the app.
Lesson one of this track is free to read in full. From lesson two on, the story, the audio and the review are part of a free account.