 Okay, so here's the first sentence. Let's listen to the recording. 先週の日曜日、私の息子の小学校で運動会がありました。 Okay, so what this means is that last week, Sunday, I, son, elementary school connected by Noel. This is basically my son's elementary school. And then this is exercise meeting. So together it means a sports festival, a sports meet. And thenありました, so was. This is our verb. So at the macro level, what we have here is we have a clause ending with the verb ある in the formal past tense form ました. And the structure of a Japanese clause is that you have, before the verb at the end, you have any number of noun phrases, each of which is marked by a particle that denotes its function in the clause. So here we have a noun phrase marked by the particle de, and here we have a noun phrase marked by the particle ga. Here, actually, this is a time expression used adverbially, and so it doesn't need a particle. So that's the exception is adverbs don't have to be marked by particles. Sometimes you'll see them marked by ni at the end, but in many cases that's not a requirement. The adverbs are also interesting. I'll throw this out here right now. Adverbs are interesting in that like in English, they can basically go anywhere in the clause. And it doesn't logically, the interpretation doesn't really change based on where you put the adverb. It might change the emphasis. It might change the feel of the sentence, but it doesn't strictly matter where you put it. I mean, you can't insert it recklessly in the middle of things. Like, you know, here you wouldn't break up like between Motoshi and Musko, you wouldn't like stick it in between that. That, of course, would break the syntax. But you could, for example, put it after a day. You could insert it like here between these two noun phrases marked by particles. Okay, so that's the basic Japanese clause structure is verb at the end. Any number of noun phrases marked by particles and then adverbs, they can kind of float around, though very typically they will come at the beginning. And also note that the noun phrases is not really a set order to which sorts of particle, which noun phrases marked by which particles come before others. You could also express this clause by flipping the order of the day noun and the gop noun. You could flip them around. And the literal sense of the sentence, I don't think would be any different. Again, it might change the feel, it might change the emphasis. And what, in this specific case, that change of emphasis or feel might be, I can't really say now, but grammatically, they're both equally valid. There definitely are tendencies of what elements of a clause tend to come before others. But as far as I know, aside from the verb coming at the end, there's not really a strict rule about the order. Okay, so the question is, well, what are these noun phrases first? So we have here, well, first the adverb phrase. So last week, Sunday. So the note particle has a couple primary uses, but one is as a connective particle that connects nouns together. Or more accurately, I'd say it marks the thing before it as a modifier. So censorship by itself just means last week, but this is last week, Sunday. Or in English, you could translate this as Sunday of last week, or last week's Sunday. Though I guess you could also say you could say last week Sunday, and that also is a valid phrase in English. So that's one thing to note about null, is that in English, we have a few different ways of expressing the same idea of taking nouns and making them into modifiers. We have the possessive s, which has a sense of like, well, possession. But then we have of, we can connect things with of, but that's kind of strange because in that case, you flip the order. And then the third thing we do, we just, you know, to turn them noun into modifier, you just stick it in front of another noun. You just use it as if it were like an adjective. In Japanese, however, they basically just have this one option, the null connecting particle. Now here we have the case of three nouns connected by null. And the understand about such cases is that how you group the elements can change the interpretation. Well, the natural interpretation in this case is that you group this as a unit because my son, that's obviously a kind of thing. Whereas alternatively, if you grouped this first, you would have a son elementary school and you'd be saying, well, it's my son elementary school, whatever son elementary school is. It's an elementary school full of sons, I suppose. Understand that which, how to group these elements, whether it's first my son, and then it's my son's elementary school, or whether it's that there's an elementary school of sons, and it's my elementary school of sons. Which of these is the proper interpretation can't be decided by the grammar, the grammar is perfectly ambiguous, like both are equally grammatically valid interpretations. And of course logically and through context, obviously the idea of my son's elementary school is by far the much more obvious interpretation and clearly what's intended here. But grammatically understand it is ambiguous. So maybe this is not the best example because it is very clear what the intended interpretation is. But you do have other cases of three or more nouns connected by null where how the elements should be grouped isn't as obvious and seems more ambiguous. But of course what we can do is we will, when we have these kinds of ambiguities, we can, in writing at least sort of disambiguate with hyphens in some cases or sometimes these commas. In Japanese, that's not really an option though. So the last question here is what is the significance of these particles? The day particle I would sum up as saying that it denotes the bounds of action or the bounds of location. And that can be both physical, literal or more metaphorical. In this case it's very literal. There's a location which is my son's elementary school and that is the bounds of the action where the action is taking place. In other cases though I'd say the sense of bounds is more abstract, it's not necessarily so literal. The ga particle, well this is usually described as being the subject particle. It marks the subject of the clause. And here that's definitely a fair interpretation. We have the sports meet, the sports festival and that is the thing which exists or did exist last Sunday. However you will find other cases particularly with certain verb forms where the thing marked by ga is not the subject as we think of it in English. In English the subject is the thing which does the action of the clause or the thing being described a quality and attribute in the case of verbs like is, so-called linking verbs. In Japanese however there are counter examples where that's quite clearly not the case. Anyway so that's something we'll have to watch out for, I can't fully explain it right now. I just wanted to throw out that that warning. So now the next sentence, let's listen. So in this case we have a clause that ends not in a verb but what's called the copula, the formal form of the copula, this. And the concept of a copula is that it links a thing with another thing or with a quality. So in this case we have, well as I'll get into, the topic of the sentence, the sports festival and it's being linked to, equated with a sport event. It is a sport event. In English our copula is well we have a few of them primarily though the verb to be. A is B, links A and B together. In Japanese though they have this distinct thing called the copula, which I think primarily because it doesn't follow the conjugation patterns of the verbs is considered its own separate thing. But anyway that's another option of how you end your clause. Either with the verb or the copula or the third option as we'll see maybe in some later example sentence with a so-called E adjective. Those are the three ways you end a clause. The other thing to note in the sentence here is that we have a sports festival marked by the particle wa, which strangely is written actually with the character ha and yet as a special case pronounced wa for this particle. And what the wa particle does is it marks a so-called topic of the sentence. So strictly speaking, undokai is not the subject of the sentence, it's the topic. What's the distinction? Well this is a perennial mystery of basic Japanese grammar. It's one of the very first totals of Japanese grammar and it's something which no source I've found has been able to properly explain. The most broad interpretation of topic is that it's something connected to the clause in some broad undefined way. It is something that is being raised in relation to the clause, but its function in the clause is not really explicitly stated. It's left open to interpretation. So the way a topic is commonly translated into English is you would say here, as for a sports festival, it is a sport event. Now in this particular case it's very obvious that the topic, its function is to basically stand in as the subject. We don't have an explicit subject marked by ga, like we did in the previous sentence. And so in this case, this is implicitly the subject of the sentence. It is a thing being ascribed to quality by the katpila, it is the thing which is a sport event. And it's true, a large majority of the time when you do see a topic in a sentence, when you do see wa, it is standing in for the subject. That is very, very common. However, there are counter examples. In some cases it could be actually implicitly an object of the clause. It could be something affected by the verb rather than the agent of action itself. So this is one area where Japanese embraces ambiguity or perhaps you would say lack of specificity relative to English and most other languages. Anyway, this is something I can't really give you a full of count of right now, partly because I don't fully understand myself, and partly because it's the sort of thing you just have to see used over and over again to get a sense of how it's properly used. 生学校のみんなが工程学校の庭で走ったり踊ったりします. And so what this means is that everyone at the elementary school, that's our subject, and then schoolyard, that's the location, and what are we doing? We're running,走ったり and踊ったり dancing. We're running dancing among other things. So the interesting thing here is it's using this pattern where you use the so-called tari form. It's like the past tense with り stuck on at the end. And you list inexhaustibly list the actions that take place and you end with a form of sutter, which in this case is the formal form of sutter. So honestly, I don't really understand this form fully. I don't know money. I've not really seen many variants of it, but it is a construction to list inexhaustibly list actions. Okay. So the subject here, the thing marked by got is again, yes, the everyone at the elementary school or possibly maybe would interpret this as everyone related to the elementary school, everyone, like the students, the teachers, the parents. I'm not sure which is the better interpretation. Maybe both are equally valid. And then here, this is interesting because, well, this is a noun phrase and here's a separate noun phrase. And what's going on here is a phenomenon which we have in English as well called opposition, where you just throw out a noun phrase. And then immediately after you follow with another noun phrase to restate it to rephrase the noun. So for example, in English, you can say like, my uncle loves pizza. And then you can say, well, my uncle comma, the the famous football player comma loves pizza. So in English and in punctuation and writing, you would, you would surround it in commas and you're just basically restating the noun in a different way. And that's what's happening here is she says a quote that meaning school yard playground and then explaining what that is in another way, same as the yard of the school. And so in writing here, they're using a comma to separate Japanese is quite loose about commas. There's no, I don't think there's any hard rules about comma usage, but it makes sense here to to separate out these two noun phrases. Otherwise, in writing, it'd be kind of ambiguous. It would look like one big long word written in kanji. Lastly here, there's again the question of, okay, well, why go instead of walk in the prior sentence, we just walk now we're using go. One is the topic. One is the subject. Could you use what in this case? Yes, you definitely could. That would change the feel of it, the sense of it slightly in some subtle way. How exactly though I'm not really prepared to say it again, the walk versus God business is infamously tricky. And most I would say that expressing something as a topic rather than explicitly as a subject has a sense of a bit more of a sense of like, oh, by the way. So like, incidentally, here's something to say about this topic. Whereas using God is more a bit of a feel of being more emphatic, more direct. Next sentence. So this is saying before Corona, the sports event, very big event was. So it was a very big event before Corona. So here at the end, we have the polite past tense form of the copula. Something is an event, and it's an event that is big, very big. Here again, we have a topic, which implicitly is acting as a subject. It is the thing which is an event. It is a very large event. And the time expression here is marked by Monday, which denotes the extent of something the limit up to is maybe the best translation. So up to before Corona is probably the best translation here. I think you would get away by just saying you would drop the money entirely and just have this as your time expression that would work. Again, noun phrases that are time expressions can be used adverbially without any explicit marking to make them adverbs. I think alternatively you could, instead of Monday, you could put knee here. And that would mark the time expression as being explicitly adverbial. I think that also would be valid. Though arguably it changes the sense a little bit because the Monday here is emphasizing the part where up to a moment in time, before Corona, up to a moment in time, it was the case that the event was very big. OK, so this is saying that morning 8 o'clock, about 8 o'clock in the morning, from about 8 o'clock in the morning, and then evening up to evening. So the sports festival, again, this is now our direct object marked by the particle wo, direct object, the thing directly affected by the action. And what is the action here? Well, it's not there. So this is a yaru, a verb meaning basically do, but having more of a sense of undertake perform. I think it is more of a sense of like an ongoing action perhaps compared to sort of. I really can't fully explain it anyway. And this is the the form of the verb here is the theater form. So the theater form. Well, depending upon the nature of the action might have a sense of ongoing action continuous action. In other cases, depending upon what the verb means exactly as more of a sense of, well, the action took place and then that the resulting state persisted. That's more appropriate for other verbs. It really is actually very contextual on what the verb is and the other context. So it's a mistake to think of it too directly as an equivalent of the English progressive tense. I think that's kind of a mistake. I know. So this is the theater form, but it's polite past tense. So they must. So what the whole sentence is saying is that it was doing the sports festival from about eight o'clock in the morning up to the evening. One last thing to note here is the word. Good I meaning about it's technically a particle actually used as a suffix on a noun to mean like about such and such about eight o'clock. If you notice, she actually pronounced it. Could I not good. Because apparently for no rhyme or reason that I can discern sometimes this word is pronounced good. I sometimes good. I don't know if there's any tendencies or patterns or anything to do with dialect or whatever. As far as I can tell, native Japanese speakers just kind of randomly alternate between the two. So this is saying the ocean meaning parents or technically both parents and. Grandparents, sorry, grandfather and about on grandmother. What are they doing? Well, the action is ikimasu formal of going go. And what are they going? They're going to see. So this is actually the so-called master stem of middle. You drop the do and you just get me and you suffix it with me. And one one sense of me is it like marks a target. In this case, I would say like the target action, the target thing to do. So we are going to see is the sense of this. And we are going to see what we're going to see the direct object here. The thing being seen is the sports festival. Honestly, I'm a little unclear on why this construction is used. There are a couple other ways of expressing the idea of doing one action to do another. I don't know why you would pick this one in this case. Anyway, so that's a kind of complicated topic. The other interesting thing going on here is so we have this in exhaustive list where we have parents, grandfathers, grandmothers. That's our subject. Notice that the first two things are connected by yaw. Yaw is like a connected particle for an exhaustive list, a list where there's possibly other things that might be included as well. We just didn't mention them. But notice the second and third items in list, they're not separated by yaw. I'm quite sure they could be. They're totally validistic yaw here. But it seems to be a case like in English where if you have a list, the rule is you have to put end between the last two elements of the list. I think it's the reverse in Japanese. You have to put it between the first two. And otherwise it's optional between the remaining elements. I believe that's effectively the rule though. I'm not really certain. Okay, so here this is saying basically, Sore de is a combination of sore meaning that and de, the particle. And you stick them together just as a sense of... It's one of many expressions you can use to just lead into a new statement. Here the translation is given so therefore etc. And then it's saying kotomo choudun toka meaning like for example, so you're marking like an example case with toka. Families, kazoku toka. And then what about them? Well, minna isshon ni so this is a verbial form of meaning together. So everyone together, what are they doing? They are eating lunch. Now this particle toka, which is, well it's a combo particle, this is called quoting particle, which I'm sure we'll encounter later and we can talk about then. But also ka, which is sometimes called the question particle. I would say it marks something that's hypothetical, something that's a possibility but not necessarily known to be true. And so you put them together and you get something, you get a combo particle that marks an example case. So again, children and families are an example case. The question is what grammatical function, like how does it fit into the rest of the clause? What purpose does it serve in the clause? An example case of what? A subject, an object of what? Well, one possibility here, I don't know if this is true. It's interesting to me that this directly precedes minna. So I wonder if the significance is that, you know, we're describing example cases of what composed, what minna is composed of. That might be what's going on here though I honestly really don't know. So what this is saying is that early morning, early waking up, bento box, bento lunch, making, slightly troublesome was. So waking up and making a bento box was slightly troublesome. Working backwards, this whole clause ends in the polite past form of the copula. So something was and what was it? It was tyhen. It was troublesome, slightly troublesome. That's an adverb. And then we have here our topic marked by a wall. And all of this technically is, this is all technically a noun phrase. It's a noun phrase. It consists of a nominalized sub clause. So in fact, this is the other major use of no, we saw it to connect to turn nouns into modifiers basically to connect nouns. But here what's happening is that immediately precedes a sub clause. Here's just like the normal Japanese clause construction ending in a verb. And this juxtaposition of verb before no tells you that you're looking at a nominalized, a nominalized clause. So when we do this, this has the sense of this clause says make a bento box. But the null here basically turns it into a noun turns it into the act of making a bento box. Okay. And the other interesting thing here is that we have basically a linked clause. We have two clauses linked together with the conjunctive form, the TAVE form. So it's like we did this, we wake up early in the morning and make a bento box. Those two things are linked. The pattern is that you have any number of clauses that link together. And the rule is that all of the clauses end in the TAVE form of the verb except the last one, which ends in a normal form of the verb. In this case, the non-past informal form of the verb. So what does linking clauses imply is interesting question. Well, in the simplest case, you're just saying two unrelated things. Just like in English, if you say, A, I did this and I did that. And there's no necessary relationship between them. That could be an interpretation of what this is saying. It's like, well, I woke up and then I also made a bento box. But very often it implies a sense of sequence where A occurs before B. So I woke up first and then made the bento box. Might be the implication here. Sometimes there's a sense of causality of like, well, I did the first thing and that caused the second thing. This is another area of Japanese where it heavily leans on just contextual inference. So grammatically, like how this is to be interpreted really largely depends on logic and context. In this case, I would say this is just has a sense of sequence. So it's like, well, I woke up first and then I made the bento box. Now, actually, I believe there's one more grammatically ambiguity here. And that is conceivably the interpretation. A grammatical interpretation would be that this is a linked clause that links not with this sub clause, but with the whole macro level top level clause. So it really doesn't make quite as much sense because you're saying wake up early morning and after waking up, well, what did you do while you had trouble making a bento box? So I mean, I guess that still kind of makes sense. That still kind of works. My guess, though, my gut feeling is that just by virtue of you hear this first. And so this naturally, I think it's more natural to interpret this as being one big linked clause that is nominalized. So this is another issue of like ambiguous grouping. English has these problems as well. Don't get me wrong. Like there are cases in English where say like some straight prepositional phrase, it's not clear if it belongs to one clause or some sub clause thereof. And you get some ambiguities that arise out of that. So no natural language, no human language is free of ambiguities. Culturally and linguistically, Japanese is just more tolerant of such ambiguity. Uchi de wa otto ga onigiri wo tsukutte watashi ga karaage toka tamagoyaki wo tsukutte imashita. Okay, so this is saying home at home, husband, onigiri, rice ball, make, and then I deep fried food, I think maybe specifically deep fried chicken, but or maybe just in this case deep fried food in general, toka for example, and then fried egg or rolled omelet maybe make or rather made past tense, teiru past tense. Okay, so at home my husband made rice balls and I made fried food and fried eggs. I think it's a sense of this. So grammatically the interesting thing going on here is, well first we have a common particle of de and wat together. So it's this in some cases when you combine two particles together, they form like a new sense. They're not really the sum of their constituent parts, but in this case it's really just Uchi might as well be marked by de or wat like either would work. And so we're just using both. It's a location of action and also it's sort of our topic because it's what we're talking about. It's like well at home as by the way at home my husband made rice balls. So that's why it's de wa here. So there's another case where we now have the linking with the tae form. So first clause linked with the second clause. I don't think sequence really makes sense here. Like it seems like they probably happened at the same time. I don't really see any causality linking these two things together. They're just two things that happened. And so that's why the tae form is used here. It's just two linked clauses because two separate things happened that are kind of they kind of go together. And note again in this this linking construction the because you use the tae form. It doesn't denote tense or other facets of the verb. So that's all left for the final form of the verb. Only the end do we learn that this took place in the past by virtue of this being the past tense. Whereas here it didn't specify whether it was past or non-past. The last thing here is you're probably wondering why is it the tae form? Why couldn't this just be skurimashita? Why does it have to be tae? What is the sense of it here? Is it saying is it trying to emphasize that the action took place in the past and when it took place it was an ongoing action? That's what the English past tense progressive conveys. Like I was making at the time in the past. It was an ongoing action of making. But again, literally what the tae form is just saying like you do an action and then exist. Like do and exist is the literal translation of the tae form. And so in some cases what it emphasizes is that an action took place and the result of that action persisted. And I think that's actually probably the sense of this year. It's saying that you made food in the past and the result of that action persisted. So why say that and why not just say skurimashita? Why not just say well I made in the past? Like why do you have to emphasize that the result of that action persisted? In this case I think it's really basically just a stylistic choice. Like it's a subtle difference of emphasis and not really a distinction. There's no real actual hard distinction of meaning between skurimashita and skurimashita in this case. If I'm wrong, if people have other theories, I'd love to hear it. But that is my sense of it. Oh, and come to think of it, you may also be wondering why in these sentences in this story, we're kind of randomly going back and forth between past tense as here past tense past tense. But then here it's present tense or I should say non past tense, non past tense, past tense, past tense, non past tense. Yeah, so what's going on? Well, if you think about it in English, what happens is, okay, so imagine I'm telling a story about something that happened in the past. And so of course you can narrate it entirely in the past tense. You can say I went to the store, I saw this guy, he did this, he did that. That all makes sense, right? But people will also in English we will say, we'll narrate a story in the present tense, even though it happened in the past. I'll say, I go to the store, I see this guy, he does this, he does that, right? That's something we can do. And people understand from context you're talking about the past. So actually what will happen then is that English speakers will kind of sloppily slide back and forth between past and present. They'll say, I went to the store, I see this guy, he does this, and then he did that. Yeah, so if you actually pay attention to how people narrate stories in English, they'll do the same thing. They'll just kind of sloppily go back and forth between past and present. So I think that's what's happening here. It's a story about the past and yet for some sentences she just sort of randomly decides to use the non-past form. Okay, next sentence. So this means grandfather, grandmother, they're marked by more and that makes it the topic. But more has a sense of as well also in addition. So grandma and grandma grandpa as well. They are the topic and then come and cut off after a clause has a sense of like because. So because come and then many make in this form of make. Well, it's a table form. It's a conjunctive form, but as we'll discuss in more detail in a minute, this has a sense of like must make must make many here. And so morning five o'clock before five o'clock in the morning and then wake up and make or rather past tense. So made wake up and make before five o'clock in the morning. Okay, so when you mark a clause with cut off, it has a sense of because it makes the it makes the clause explanatory. So because grandma and grandpa are coming also coming, we must make a lot. And so before five o'clock in the morning, we get up and make or made stuff. So one thing here is the time expression before five o'clock in the morning is marked by me to make it explicitly and verbal expression. I'm not sure you need that. I think you could leave it out and now in time expressions are generally just understood to be adverbs. They don't strictly require me. So I think you could drop it in this case. Another small thing is here. Honestly, I don't really know why there's no yacht or toll between grandpa and grandma. Perhaps this is sort of like a set phrase that's understood as being a unit like grandma and grandpa. I'm not sure about that. Anyway, together they are the the topic of this clause. And then another question is why is this present tense. So we're past tense here, but then the explanation is, well, I shouldn't say present. I should say non past tense. Well, like in English, when you use the present tense, we're often not really talking about something happening right now. We're talking about habitual action, right? So like grandma and grandpa, because grandma and grandpa also come, therefore we must make a lot. That makes sense if we're talking about an event that reoccurs. If it were a one-off event that happened in the past, it'd be kind of weird to use the present tense in that case. So I think that's what's going on here. In this case, we're talking about a reoccurring event. And so it's okay. It makes sense to use non past because the coming is habitual. It's something they do when this yearly event is held. So there are a number of ways in Japanese to express the idea of a verb being obligatory. Something you have to do. That's something that must be done. So what we have here is actually confusingly a contracted form of skuro na kereba. So that is the bah, meaning conditional form of the verb. That's also negative. So if not make, and na kereba has been contracted to na kya. Or actually the way it's pronounced if you listen, it's just as na kya-i. She like sluffs it into this initial e sound. And then what follows it? So this is iku in the potential negative te form, conjunctive form. So iku, just the potential form is ikeru. And then the potential negative is ikai nae. And then make that the conjunctive te form, the nae becomes nokte. So ikai nokte, that's how you say, cannot go. So very literally, if not make, cannot go. And it's the way of expressing obligation or something that must be done. And the sense to be clear of cannot go here is not literal. It's not necessarily like physical, traversal. It's about like something wouldn't do. That's the closest English equivalent I can think of is like, well if you did this, that wouldn't do is sort of what this construction is saying. And so here let's listen to it again and listen closely and you'll hear that the way she pronounces this na kya-i. So this is saying again, must make a lot. And there's other ways you could express this idea, but this is one way of doing it. So sorede first is again like so or therefore is just sort of a way to lead into a statement. Then we have parents explicitly pluralized. That's our topic. And then, well, okay, so the verb here is go and the target of where we're going is school and adverb expression here of early morning. And also there's another adverb here, dekirudake, which is like as much as one can, as much as possible. So I think it's saying as early as possible in the morning, go to school. The next part, let's see. So truck, near and good place. So this is all saying a good place that is near a truck is really what it's saying. The location where the thing exists and what is the thing that exists? It is here, it's a leisure sheet, literally, meaning here a picnic blanket. And this is another case where she's using an apposition. She stated a noun phrase, leisure sheet, and then she stated it in another way. She said picnic sheet, which means the same thing. There's something a little strange here where she's snuck in a disney here. Like, and normally you don't have formal forms of the coppola or verbs except at the very end of a sentence. And so you would expect to have the period at the end instead of a comma. So this is the sort of thing you probably don't see in properly written Japanese. This is of course a transcript of something someone said. So it's sort of a tick of verbal speech, but I think by the standards of written Japanese it's not something you would normally see. Anyway, so the last part here, shiitou oite, the te form of okubi meaning put. So we're putting a sheet, meaning like putting it down on the ground, I assume. And then basou tote masu to, taking a spot. Or I should say here this is actually past tense. So took a spot is what this is saying. So we put down a sheet and took a spot. And this is another case where the use of the teiru form is a little strange to English speaker's expectations because again, if the teiru form is really the equivalent of the English progressive tense, then this would mean like, I was taking, we were taking a spot, like continuously doing the act of taking the spot, which is a strange idea and not something you would normally say. But I think there's another case where actually the sense of it is well, we took the spot and the result of that action persisted. I'm not really sure if there's any real difference in this case, literally, in the literal meaning between tote masu tote masu to. I think it's another case of just sort of like a very subtle sort of shift of emphasis. It's like emphasizing the, well, we did the thing and then it wasn't just a momentary action, like the result of it, we made use of it for some time, I suppose. I don't know, that's the best I can come up with. Otherwise it doesn't really make sense to me.