On the 5lvl in info about 自分 I saw that sentences:
ちゃんと自分でしゅくだいをしました。
Can you tell me what で is doing here? I know about the noun + adjective + de scheme but this doesn’t look like this usage. If you can, pls explain for me the logic of this sentence.
The sentence means: I quickly did the homework by myself.
自分で = で is marking 自分 as a method or tool to mean “by myself”
EDIT: oops tense mistake
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Now that make sense, thank you
You’re welcome. Below is a breakdown of different functions of で.
https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-grammar/particle-de-expressing-supplementary-information/
I think it’s ‘I properly did the homework myself’, because ちゃんと generally means ‘properly’. In more natural English, it might be something like ‘I made sure I did the homework myself (as I ought to)’.
Just to add on, you’ll also see this pattern with numbers of people, as in「五人でしました」, which could be translated as ‘we/you/they did [it] as a group of five’. You can therefore also see で as the て-form of だ・である・です, which would allow you to literally translate「五人でしました」as ‘being five people, we did [it]’ or ‘we were five people, and we did [it]’. That sounds weird in English, but the overall meaning matches what’s being said in Japanese.
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