These are taken from Tim Kae’s Guide to Japanese Grammar (Category: Essential Grammar –> Other uses of the te-form).
I’ll just copy-paste them here:
1. 色々な人と付き合って*きた*けど、いい人はまだ見つからない。
Went out (up to the present) with various types of people but a good person hasn’t been found yet.
2. 日本語をずっと前から勉強して*きて*、結局はやめた。
Studied Japanese from way back before and eventually quit.
What I don’t understand is why the second sentence uses きて instead of きた in してきて. Why is it not past tense like with 合ってきた in the first sentence? Looking at the context in English, should it not be past tense?
3 comments
> Looking at the context in English, should it not be past tense?
Japanese isn’t English. You should let go of trying to equate Japanese and English concepts (whether grammar or words) with each other asap
To answer the question, that’s just how that works in Japanese. The tense of the whole construct is determined by the final verb. You have to use た in the first sentence because the verb is followed by けど and (afaik) the て-form can’t be used before it
In this second sentence, て form is being used to connect two ideas. It’s basically functioning as “and” or “and then”. When used like this, you don’t switch to past tense until the end of sentence. You also can’t use a past tense word in the middle of a sentence without something like けど (as in the first sentence) to connect it to the next part of the sentence.
Check out this guide, under the “fundamental uses of て form” section.
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese-grammar/te-form/
て form is quite versatile. You’ll keep learning new uses for it as you study. Good luck!
It is explained in the section right before that on how to connect sentences:
[https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/compound](https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/compound)
Your first example uses the conjunction けど, the second example uses the て form.