The Purpose
“Success demands singleness of purpose.” - Vince Lombardi
In this chapter, we’re going to be covering a few different things. First, we’ll work on and continue to practice the present/future tense dictionary form verbs (the ones you worked on last chapter). Secondly, we’ll practice things you’ve already gone over in the past. At the end, you’ll work on the next ten kanji, do a little porpoise-related dance, then move on.
The grammar you’re learning in this chapter (“Purpose” grammar) is uncharacteristically flexible. This does a few things (both good and bad). First, it makes it much harder to teach the grammar point in a simple, more effective way. Second, it makes things more flexible, allowing you to learn just one grammar point (and then be able to say a lot of different, though somewhat similar, things). I’m going to start by putting up a few English sentences, just to help give you an idea of what kinds of things we’re learning. No Japanese for now… I only want you to understand and know what we’re focusing on in a language you already understand. That way, we can build off of it. I’ll be bolding the “purpose-ish” parts for you to make it easier to pinpoint what we’ll be focusing on after this page.
For the test, I studied.
To Learn English, I will go to America.
In order to eat sushi, I will go to the restaurant.
See how purpose parts of these sentences are pretty similar in meaning? They aren’t written the same way, but the meaning is generally the same. There’s one grammar point that pretty much covers all these different ways of expressing why you’re doing something (or explaining what the purpose is for your actions). We’re going to learn that grammar point right now, and then start small for the purpose of learning more and more complicated sentences (see what I did there?).
Before you move on, though, you’ll want to add (and study) the next Ultimate Vocab deck by downloading it and adding it to TextFugu Vocab on Anki:
Ultimate Vocab #4 on Anki
When you’ve done that, you’ll be ready to learn your purpose. Is it to become fluent Japanese? Only one way to find out…