“Great performers are, by definition, abnormal; they strive throughout their entire careers to separate themselves from the pack.” – John Eliot
This is the last て-form grammar practice grammar for at least a couple of lessons. Hopefully by now て form is hammered home and you’re starting to get comfortable with it. If not, keep practicing, you’ll get there.
The grammar you’re learning in this lesson is から. から has several meanings, but they’re all sort of similar in a way, so we’ll learn them together in this chapter and the next. You’ll just have to bend your thinking on a few English grammar concepts for it all to make perfect sense, but I believe in you.
For now, though, I want you to associate から with the word “from.”
Go ahead and do that inside that brain of yours then then move on.
Nounから
In English, you can use the word “from” with all kinds of nouns.
From 4:00pm…
From the train station…
From my drink…
These are all nouns that you’re “fromming.” In Japanese the ordering of the sentence isn’t like this though. When you want to say that one thing is from another thing, you have to follow that first thing with から, not precede it.
4:00pm から…
From 4:00pm…
Train station から…
From the train station…
My Drink から…
From my drink…
The pattern here is very simple but possibly mind boggling as an English speaker.
Noun + から (or subject + から).
After the から portion, you just basically add a second sentence, talking about what happens next.
a ４時からはたらきます。
From 4:00 I will work / I will work from 4:00.
a えきから来ました。
I came from the train station. / from the train station I came.
a のみものから虫が出た。
A bug came out from my drink. / From my drink a bug came.
Keep this pattern in mind and then move on to the next から. It will help you as you learn it.
て-Form から
You can also use から on て-form (told ya it would pop up). When you do this, から still means “from” but it’s more like “from a point in time when the action takes place.” For this, it’s easier to use a different translation, though: “after.”
After eating…
After drinking…
After swimming…
If you think about it, though, the word “after” has a lot of “from” in it as well. When you’re saying something is taking place after an action, you’re also saying it’s taking place from an action. So, you’re still not using that “from” anchor even though I’ll be translating てから as “after” instead of as “from” here in the lessons. It’s really the same thing, but in English we distinguish it.
食べてから…
After eating…
のんでから…
After drinking…
およいでから…
After swimming…
After this (see what I did there?) you can follow it up with any kind of sentence you want. Think of it like its own separate sentence where you say anything you want about the previous portion of the sentence.
a 食べてからテニスをしました。
After eating I played tennis.
a のんでから家に帰った。
After drinking I returned home.
a およいでから肉を食べたいです！
After swimming I want to eat meat!
So now you know two kinds of からs. Try to recall both of them from memory before moving on. If you have trouble doing this, reread through the sections and then try again.
There’s One More から…
It’s true, there is, but you’ll learn that in the next chapter. It’s a bit more complicated than these two, and covers nouns, adjectives, and verbs all in one. It also has a slightly different meaning / translation.
Before you move on with this chapter, though, I want you to think about the two からs you learned. There is the noun-version and the te-form-version. How do they both work? Can you come up with a couple of simple made-up sentences on your own? If you can, you can move on to the practice.