Hey guys, to improve my Japanese I am reading the NHK News Web Easy headlines (https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/) once a day. I am not good enough to read the complete articel. I want to use this thread to ask questions about the headlines.
For this headline I have a question (Articel):
日本の人口が１０年続けて減った.
I understand that the Japanese population is decreasing over the last 10 years. But what does the けて stand for?
続けて is the て -form of the verb 続く。
The て form of 続ける. Though in this context it is not merely that て form, but a grammar point meaning “in a row,” “successively” or “continuously.”
So 10年続けて means “10 years in a row.”
“Over X years” would use a grammar point like にわたって
Ah, understood. Thank you =)
No problem. I would just caution that “headline grammar” can be a little atypical in any language, so there could be unusual things here and there that wouldn’t crop up in actual articles’ text.
This time I took the first sentence of the artice (URL) instead of the headline:
JＲ東海は、来年の東京オリンピックの前から、東海道新幹線で「Ｎ７００Ｓ」という新しい車両を使います
So from my understanding the message is that JR TOUKAI announced that they will use the new railroad cars called (N700s) for the Tokaido Shinkansen. I hope this is correct.
What I don’t understand is the timing:
来年の東京オリンピックの前から
Does that mean that the new cars will be used until next year’s Tokyo Olympics?
I recommend the Tangoristo app for helping you to read NHK News Web Easy article content.
You can tap on the words you don’t know and the English translation appears at the bottom of the screen. Each article has a bar graph to show proportion of JLPT N5, N4, N3, N2, N1 content.
I have the paid version which makes it ad free.
When I read it I understood that they will have a battery that will allow them to work even with a power outage