“If you can’t, you must.” – Tony Robbins
Now that you’ve learned about giving and receiving, it’s time to apply that knowledge to something else: Giving and receiving actions. In English, this doesn’t make much sense. For example, it would be weird if you said:
“Could you give me the action of eating that?” or…
“I will receive the action of you drinking that beer.”
Sounds odd, right? In Japanese, however, this is totally okay. There’s a better way to translate these in English, though it wouldn’t be a literal translation. It would go something like this:
“Could you eat that for me?” or “Could you please eat that?”
“You’ll drink that beer for me” or “Could you please drink that beer?”
A lot more simple, right? Japanese is more like the first set of examples, though. Perhaps you’ve already figured out how it’s done, too, just by piecing together previous grammar points as well as the くれる, もらう, and あげる things you’ve learned previously. It goes something like this:
て-form:
Start by making the action you want to use into て-form (bet you saw that one coming). For example:
食べる → 食べて
Then, add the くれる or あげる to your verb.
食べてくれる？
Will you eat it for me?
食べてあげる。
I’ll eat it for you.
Let’s begin with some simple examples to start you off:
これを見てくれる？
Will you look at this?
それを食べてくれる？
Will you eat that?
あそこに行ってくれる？
Will you go over there?
このりんごを食べてあげる。
I’ll eat this apple for you.
As you may have noticed, もらう is harder to use in these situations, at least until you learn potential “can do” form, which will be a little later. For now, it will be easier to stick with あげる and くれる, as they’re the most useful and straight forward for your current level.
Let’s give this concept a quick practice, then we’ll learn a couple other ways to say the same thing using different words.