to start, to begin to
Structure
- Verb[stem] + はじめる
- Verb[stem] + はじめた
Alright, just making sure I wasn’t missing some sort of subtlety.
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日本語（にほんご）を勉強（べんきょう） しはじめて すぐ
why しはじめてrather than しはじめた?
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Hey! If you were to say 日本語を勉強し始めた。すぐ日本語の難しさが分かった。The English equivalent would be “I started studying Japanese. I soon understood the difficulty of Japanese.” However, if you use the conjunctive 始めて here, the sentence flows much more naturally in both English and Japanese. 日本語を勉強し始めてすぐ、日本語の難しさが分かった。- " Soon after I started studying Japanese, I realized the difficulty of the language." You will also often find 始めて paired with すぐ and から, so if you see すぐ or から immediately following the blank, it is a good indicator to use the て-form of 始める. Cheers!
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I ran into that trap as well. In a case like this, should 始めて only be used when followed by すぐ or から, or are there other examples as well ?
I’m confused when to use て vs た in a case like this.
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@Paulkun Hey! When the て-form appears in the middle of a sentence, it is usually acting as a conjunction between two parts of the sentence. So, in the above example, if we were to remove すぐ altogether, we would still have a functional sentence: 日本語を勉強し始めて、(すぐ)日本語の難しさが分かった。 Notice the comma after 始めて. Using the て-form here is like saying “and” in English, so the English translation might be something like, “I started studying Japanese and I realized the difficulty of the language.” When the て-form is used in this way, whatever precedes it will happen or has happened before anything that follows it.
The た(past)-form can only be used in the middle of a sentence if it is followed by a particle. た cannot be paired with すぐ like て and if we pair た with から, it changes the meaning of から from “since”/“from” to “because.” Therefore, if we were to say: 日本語を勉強し始めたから日本語の難しさが分かった。the sentence would mean “Because I started studying Japanese, I realized its difficulty.”
I hope this helps clear things up a bit. Let me know if you have any further questions. Cheers!
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Maybe I’m mistaken, but I think the last two examples in the grammar section for はじめる accidentally use はじまる instead?
コンサートはもうすぐ始まりますよ。
空手の試合は2時間始まった。
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It’s even more jarring because of the caution box immediately underneath those examples: “Caution - It can be easy to accidentally use 始まる, the intransitive form of this verb. However, with this expression, the transitive form will always be used”
Oh the irony.
It’s actually the last three sentences that just don’t belong in this grammar point, which is specifically not about standalone verbs.
Actually, I want to start by saying I’m no longer sure if this is even the right place to ask, since seemingly these threads dedicated to specific grammar points are all dead with last reply a year or more in the past. 
But it does redirect you here from the question so here’s hoping…
So I’m wondering about the above point. I was hit with the following question:
彼が___から1時間経った。(話す)
and I answered:
彼が話し始めたから1時間経った。
…and was marked wrong. So what is actually going on here? Are we forced to use てから here? Can you not use the た form as it would somehow change the meaning to “because”? Google TL seems to translate the た form version pretty much identically without the meaning shift.
Now I do know you can’t trust Google TL (or any automated TL for that matter), but it does provide some guidance. Anyone willing to shed some light? 
Hey @Yumari-1 !
For this question we are looking for an answers that has the nuance of ‘since’ so 〜たから would not work.
彼が話し始めたから1時間経った。An hour has passed because he started talking (Because he started talking, an hour has passed).
彼が話し始めてから1時間経った。 It has been an hour since he started talking (An hour has passes from the time he started talking).
I hope that this answers your question!
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Thanks for the quick answer!
I think I get it now. The point being that the main meaning of から is always “from/because” and if we change てから to たから, the から particle reverts back to its more primary meaning (no longer means “once … then something else”) and hence stops working with this particular example.
I hope my understanding is not messed up. 
I’ve seen other stuff like this and I am kind of confused. Why is it はじめた instead of はじまた because nobody is causing the snow to fall, it is falling by itself shouldn’t the intransitive version be used?
When 始める is used as an auxiliary, the main verb is what determines transitivity. 降り始める is therefore intransitive because 降る is intransitive.
You can think of it as 降り acting as the object for 始める.
始まる isn’t used as an auxiliary and if it was, its past form would be 始まった.