ために
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” - Plato
The one grammar point that we’re focusing on this chapter is “ために.”
ために means “the purpose of,” “in order to,” “for” and other similar things like that. Basically, you’re saying “For the purpose of A, I’m doing B.” Depending on what you’re talking about though, the rules change (just a little bit). First, let’s look at those rules. You don’t have to memorize all of them right now, but writing them down might be a good idea (for reference on the next page). In this chapter, we’re only going to be looking at how ために gets used with nouns and verbs. Using ために with adjectives is possible, but it’s also not as common (and sort of has a different meaning). Staying focused will help simplify things (for now) as well, and we can get to the adjectives later on. 80-20 rule (verbs and nouns make up more than 80% of the ために usage, I’d say).
Verbs:
v.dictionary + ために
たべる ために (for the purpose of eating…)
Nouns:
noun + の + ために
くるま の ために (for the car…)
So, what you need to know before you move on is that with verbs, you’re always going to use dictionary form + ために and for nouns you’ll need to add a の in there (nounのために) … it’s like saying “[the noun]‘s purpose” where “the purpose” belongs to the noun.
Once you’ve remembered those two differences (verb and noun ために patterns) move on to the next page!