In this N4 lesson, there is this sentence:
独立して暮らせるように働き始めた。
My question is not about ように, but about everything that precedes it. AFAIK:
I am struggling to put these two pieces together to mean what they’re supposed to, when linked with て. Is there a Bunpro lesson that covers this usage of て?
It’s covered in Lesson 5 of N5.
I presume you’re referring to this one? That’s the only て point I can find in that lesson. And I don’t think it’s the right one for this phrase.
The phrase is not:
“To be independent and then to be able to live”… i.e. two verbs linked with “and then”.
Rather it is:
“To be able to live independently”. It’s almost like the part preceding the て is being used adverbially. That’s very different from the lesson I linked above.
i believe this kind of verb-verb construction can be conceived of as “to be independent and live” but we wouldn’t say that in English so it becomes “to live independently”
the linked grammar point offers both explanations for “and” and “then” so I think it does cover it, but for some reason the example sentences only include “then”
but another example would be like 持ってくる which you can translate as literally hold and come (i.e. bring)
The “and then” translation applies to chronological lists of activities. That doesn’t really apply here. These are more just descriptive items than activities that occur in sequence.
Otherwise, it’s more of an “and” translation. So something like “to be independent and live.”
That’s not terribly natural English, but such is the nature of translation.
Going of what some others have already brought up, the explanation that is the closest to what you’re probably looking for is an N4 lesson.
In your sentence, the verb 独立して is acting as a means or circumstance in which one can live, so it’s modifying 暮らせる in this way and thus in translation it becomes “to be able to live independently”. While the lesson doesn’t explicitly state that this construction can be used adverbially, you can see it acting this way in one of the example sentences.
寝坊をしたので慌てて準備をした。
Since I overslept, I got ready in a flurry.
Here, 慌てて is being used to describe 準備する in the same way, and is also translated as such, with “in a flurry” describing “got ready”. Idk if I put that in a way that makes sense but hopefully it helps clear things up
You know, I think that is it. And you want to hear something funny? I’ve been in like 1 hour of conversation with 3 different LLMs about this topic before posting here. And the very first link that ChatGPT gave me an hour ago was… that link. But I argued back with it at the time, and then went through a million other bad answers before coming here.
My bad argument at the time was that the lesson says:
the nuance is quite often that ‘(A) allowed/led to (B)’
And I argued that “being independent does not allow living”. But when I think now instead of “by means of” or a tool… then it’s easy to think of “being independent” as a tool that one lives by the means of. And it also fits nicely with my belief that this is an adverbial usage, which I still believe despite it not being called out anywhere explicitly.
These things are much harder to visualize when it’s a stative verb. Compare “living by means of being independent” vs “traveling by means of riding a bike”. The former is so much more abstract. I think I’m also realizing that maybe I’ve always viewed “living” as a binary, passive thing (alive or not), whereas this concept treats it more as an active continuous state.
ありがとう ! 
And you want to hear something funny? I’ve been in like 1 hour of conversation with 3 different LLMs about this topic before posting here. And the very first link that ChatGPT gave me an hour ago was… that link.
I don’t blame you for not trusting ChatGPT lol, I also would have been skeptical.
Also, you’re welcome! Good luck on your studies :))
LLMs are generally extremely good with their understanding of human language rules. All 3 LLMs I talked to gave me exactly the same reasoning for how that grammar worked. But most of them struggled at linking me to a definitive source for their claims. I specifically asked to be linked to a Bunpro lesson, and Gemini and Claude immediately linked me to different て lessons. ChatGPT did link me to the right one first, but after I disagreed, it conceded to my bad argument and started offering up other て lessons instead. With all 3 of them, after I said “no that’s not it” to a long enough string of answers, they shrugged and said “sorry maybe it’s not on Bunpro, we suggest you consult DBJG”.
In months of conversations, I’ve yet to find an LLM be glaringly wrong about grammar rules. Though they usually suck at explaining where they get their knowledge from.
I’m in the “て always means ‘and’” camp of people. Sometimes it’s contrived, but even in the N4 lesson on means, “and” still vaguely fits.
行ってください - Go and bestow that going upon me = Please go!
食べてみて - Eat it and see (how it went) = Try to eat!
独立して暮らせる - To Be self reliant and be able to live = Able to live independently
The different grammar points help differentiate ways to use “and” to convey an idea. In English, we don’t use “and” this way, so saying て = “and” isn’t perfectly accurate, but it’s pretty close.
I kind of agree with you after thinking about this more overnight. I’m also realizing that the English and behaves very differently in different cases, and it has a lot to do with whether or not the verb is active or stative, but it also just has to do with context. Consider:
I’m going to ride a bike and swim.
This is a sequence. We don’t think they’re going to do both simultaneously, or that one enables the other.
I’m going to eat popcorn and watch a movie.
This is most likely simultaneous actions. Both are active verbs, just like before, but the meaning changes because of the context.
I’m going to work hard and succeed.
This is means. The hard work is what enables the success. I think the change here is due to succeed being a stative verb.
So… yeah. Maybe the English and does work the same way. 
I think one of my favorite things about learning Japanese is when it helps me understand my own language in new ways.
I think a lot of my confusion was due to “case mismatch” during translation. E.g. the Japanese sentence was clearly presenting a “means” type of and, and I was thinking, “but that’s not a logical sequence!”
I think it’s important when learning another language to not try and map some functions onto another too much.
As Wittgenstein said, “if a lion could speak, we should not be able to understand him”. I’m slightly unfairly appropriating his quote here, but I think it applies to language learning as a whole as well.
When studying another language, I think it’s good to put yourself in the mind of the lion- rather than using your own frame of reference to understand (resulting in mistranslation), shift your paradigm into that of the lions.
I think the same generally applies to grammar at a certain point. We use “and” as a short hand to explain “te”, but realistically, it’s a shortcut. Treating each language as its own within its own field of reference may be more useful in the long run than trying to reconceptualise it in another language. Thus grammar points are descriptive tools to help you get inside that field of reference, not prescriptivist rules that define them.
Sorry idk if this comment is fully relevant, just this topic made me reflect a bit on my time with Wittgenstein and how that has impacted my language learning.
I get your point, and I guess to some extent I agree. But I think I also disagree. Maybe it’s the engineer or mathematician in me. But I think both languages are sufficiently evolved that I’d be surprised if there is a concept that can be expressed in one but not another. Maybe it’s not easy to translate, e.g. maybe a single word requires an entire paragraph (like this one which is probably the most confusing one I’ve dealt with in my first year of learning).
But fundamentally, humans from all cultures experience life in similar ways, and feel like for any concept, there exists some logic than can map it between the two languages.
But I guess I’m talking past you. You didn’t say it’s not possible, only that it’s maybe not valuable. And I guess I understand that… but I’ll never be able to stop my mind from getting lost in the weeds. 
Also I suspect the trap I’m falling into is extremely necessary in the earlier stages (when you can only think in your native language) and becomes unnecessary, purely by nature, as you progress. Meaning there’s no point in telling myself to change here.
This. There is no “ground truth” in languages, just useful patterns. Linguists will deconstruct a language to explain it with rules, which can be helpful, but there’s endless exceptions. Even a literal translation of words will sound awkward in English and will need reinterpreting as “Japanese grammar with English words.”
In this case Japanese has a lot of words which just fit together, especially with verbs. It’s like the difference between going to “watch/see/view/look a movie.” Only some of those verbs make sense when it comes to movies. But replace the word “movie” with the word “bird” and the nuances become different.
Japanese is so different to English that it’s frequently better to accept vague ideas and immerse yourself in the language, which gives an understanding of when something is natural to say, and when it’s not.
This is a huge subject though, very interesting, but I could write three theseses on it and not be done.
no worries, I kinda talked past you to begin with, but thank you for sparking a reminder of my philosophy minor so I can feel some use for it hahahaha
and ofc I think you’re right, as a beginner its a totally different situation
philosophising about pedagogy is not always the same as what is pedagogically realistic…
Forgive my short off-topic novel, I just think this is an interesting point and it touches on 2 things that I like to think about!
tl;dr: I disagree that there is always some logic that can map any concept between 2 languages, but I think you do gotta start with the stuff that is mappable
Sure you can always find some mapping between two languages, but I think that mapping will always only be an approximation because our ability for expression with language is fundamentally limited. Even in your native language, there are feelings that one would be hard-pressed to express in words (the line “they should have sent a poet” from the movie Contact comes to mind). This is only made more apparent when you recognize that everyone has a different emotional/cultural relationship with language – there cannot be logic that perfectly maps one language onto another because language is not a strictly logical thing, it has been built upon and evolved with the culture, emotions, and philosophy of those who have used it throughout history.
I also have a STEM background (physics), so I think of it like this: Languages are not bijective. There exists some space of all possible things a human might want to express. Every language is like a coordinate system that describes some volume (but never the entirety) of this space. No two coordinate systems ever fully overlap – there is always some volume covered by one that is not covered by another, some region where a mapping between coordinate systems breaks down or is incomplete (think the poles in the mapping between spherical and Cartesian coordinates). In these unmappable regions, you either have to turn to art, or to the native coordinate system in which that region is covered (sorry spherical coordinates, I’m working on the z-axis so I gotta speak in Cartesian)
With that said, I do think its hard to explore those unmappable regions until you’re relatively comfortable with the mappable regions. You don’t have to tell yourself to change here, but I think it will help to understand that most explanations are good approximations or useful models at best (the same way valence shells are a useful model for chemistry before you learn about orbitals). Like @Hairymini said:
Japanese is so different to English that it’s frequently better to accept vague ideas and immerse yourself in the language, which gives an understanding of when something is natural to say, and when it’s not.
After all, even the explanation for だ begins with “For the most part…”
Then again, if you want to become a translator or a language teacher, you might need to have it both ways 
I think this is the salient point. And satisfies hx9’s point about having it both ways.
Years ago I was dating a Colombian girl, and my Spanish skills were only mediocre. I was at her place for the first time, and we were cooking. I didn’t know the word for butter, so I described it (in Spanish, using words I’ve lost even more of by now) as “the thing from cows that you spread on toast”. She knew what I meant, but her English wasn’t quite good enough to tell me the butter was almost gone, so she handed me the tiny amount that was left and said “it’s gonna over”.
We both knew exactly what the other meant, and to this day I still think “it’s gonna over” when I see some resource is running low. 
I know that all the people who tell me “watch out, there’s not a perfect mapping between English and Japanese” are correct. But I also get just a little bit of a rebellious urge to push back, because… c’mon. Language is for communication, and we know that bilingual people in these cultures are perfectly able to communicate. My Japanese partner has been using English as her “primary” daily language for over 15 years (the second half of her life), and she’s very good, but it’s still obvious it’s a second language. Phonetically, she still struggles with l’s and r’s (as I always will in her language… I make her judge my 便利 pronunciation daily), and semantically she very often leaves out prepositions and articles (“I’m going gym” is a frequent text I get from her), and gendered pronouns still trip her up (any time she uses one, she usually says “he… she” in rapid succession, like she didn’t know which to choose so just threw both out to be safe). But even with all of those tiny mistakes, she’s never once had an issue communicating with me. Nothing has ever been lost in translation between us. Though I’ll admit some archaic phrases that we hear in old American movies are hard for me to explain to her (but maybe because I don’t even fully grasp them myself).
And even though the engineer in me wants to approach this like a perfect mathematical system… that is only the ideal model, which I know is unattainable. But unattainable goals still have value, and that value here is to get me as close to friction-free communication as possible. 
I think though that people who are fluent in communication even if not perfect very importantly have started to think in terms of their target language though, even if they make mistakes. Thus mapping is now usually out the window. When treading on unbroken linguistic ground (for them) they might resort back to 1:1 mapping/direct translation, but generally the more you communicate, the more you operate inside the frame of reference of your target language. I think that’s what makes successful long term language learning, and why trying too hard to map can be a bit of a trap. It can become a crutch (and I see this a lot with beginners) and I think that one of the most important things in intermediate to high-level language learning is a tolerance for ambiguity and the ability to let go of trying to equate everything. OFC, learners need training wheels, that’s why they’re there, I just kinda want to point out that it’s something most people need to learn to let go of.
But also all of this is probably v easy for me to say bc I’m a vibes based language learner to begin with lol