Are you using a textbook? I used Genki and it drills the hell out of you with all the conjugations that you encounter in N5. I would go running and listen to the practice section’s audio and that really helped.
If it’s any consolation, the て form conjugates the same way as casual past tense た, so once you’ve learned either form you already know the other.
So a verb followed by て means it is being done? Like “ing” at the end of words in english? Or am I not understanding this correctly?
Yep! This Tae Kim passage should expand on it a bit more.
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/progressive_tense
You’ll also learn how て can be used to link things, but for now yes you’re on the right path!
My man pee pee bailing me out again
That webpage made it a lot more clear than the bunpro snippet ty
Yeee there’s a few N5 points that you need to learn off-site because there’s a lot to them, this is certainly one of them. Glad I could help, good luck with the conjugation 
No, you are thinking of いる which is an auxiliary verb that attaches after <conjunctive form of verb>て.
て is a conjunctive particle. It allows you to connect two clauses together. There are more grammar points on this site which show how it can be used.
Oops I completely screwed up, for some reason I thought this was the ている point and went off that wrong assumption. @gyroninja is 100% correct, disregard my earlier post!
I didn’t understand any of that.
Would you be so kind to give an example or dumb it down a bit?
Okay I read in my genki book since I remembered that the site gives book pages to reference parts you don’t understand. Now I think I have a slight working knowledge of what Te does but I don’t quite understand one point of it. How does it chance the example sentences?
食べる → 食べて
How is either part different? The examples are a bit too short for me to figure out and my book didn’t use those kind of examples so could someone tell me what it chances please?
返す → 返して
How is the right different from the left?
For example if you want to take “I woke up” 起きた and “I made breakfast” 朝ごはんを作った and combine them into a single sentence one way to do that is to use the て particle.
“I woke up and made breakfast” 起きて朝ごはんを作った
Oh that’s what that means thank you very much that makes a lot more sense
Short answer: Because 食べて is used to connect another clause to the sentence. This can’t be done with just 食べる.
Long answer:
The left (食べる) is either the plain form or attributive form of 食べる.
Plain form is the form of a verb which represents an event which has not yet completed and is usually used at the end of a sentence.
Attributive form is the form used when you are describing a noun. For example 食べる人 is a person who eats.
When 食べて is used, you should expect it to be connected to another clause. If you were to see 食べて人, 人 would not be being described by 食べる, but rather人 belongs to the next clause that is being connected after the て particle.
On the right (食べて) we have the conjunctive form of 食べる, which is 食べ, followed by the て particle. Even without the て particle conjunctions can still be made, but this is more of a literary thing as it’s a part of classical Japanese. Bunpro has a grammar point on this here. A very important thing to note is that when attaching the て particle to the conjunctive form a euphonic change happens. This is why the て form of 座る is 座って and not 座りて. In fact that’s the whole point of the grammar point that this thread is about.
Thank you!
How can we say “i am trying to remember what I memorized yesterday.” // “kinou, oboeta no wo oboete miteimasu” ???
for example: yesterday i learned lots of new kanji and today (now) i am looking the kanji and trying to remember, kanji’s meanings
Some points:
Thank you very very much for your reply.
If I have learned this issue incorrectly or incompletely, I would like you to correct me. I know that “てみる” is “used in situations where you are not sure whether you will be successful in doing an action.” am I wrong? and in the example I gave, I used “てみる” because I thought “let’s see if I can remember” the kanji I learned a few days ago (but I wasn’t sure about whether I could remember them correctly) and took action.
If I have chosen a wrong grammatical rule in this regard, I would like to learn the correct one from you.
Why do the reviews for this grammar point use fragment sentences?
For example, review sentences include:
As an English speaker, these sentences are confusing because they’re incomplete, and since these are the sentences I see in my reviews, I feel like I’m not really reviewing how this particle is used in real life.
Are these considered complete sentences in Japanese? Or is Bunpro showing us fragment sentences on purpose? If that is the case, why?
I having bit of trouble distinguishing some of the て grammar because they overlap sometimes. are we sure 1 or 2 of them may not be redundant? thank you
１て・で sequence (N5)
２～て (Conjunction) (N5)
３て・で (Adjectives and Nouns) (N5)
４て・で (Qualities and States) (N5)
５て・で (Reasons and Causes) (N4)
６～て・で (Non-Sequence) (N4)
７～て・で (Casual request) (N4)
て is a grammatical structure in Japanese that has very broad usage. Although they all stem from the same thing, the various uses are often taught individually across both N5 and N4, just to give learners enough exposure to start to develop an intuition for it.
@additionalramen sorry about the super late reply, it looks like your question was never answered! 
. If you’re just reading the translation, I can definitely see where you are coming from. Do you think maybe a translation like ‘To eat and then ~.’ would be better? To show that something would usually follow next.
LOL I totally forgot about this! I think I get now that the point of the exercises in this grammar point is just to practice the conjugation. However, I still find it odd that the sentences in the “About Verb + て” section are full sentences while the practice sentences are fragments. My personal preference is to practice the grammar points in the context of full sentences to see how they are used IRL. And most of the Bunpro grammar points do provide full sentences to practice with for the cloze-style reviews, so I’m not sure why this one would be an exception.