alt Hacker NewsIt's even better. The "X-te" (Xて) is technically not X in present tense, it is specifically X in the te-form (て is read "te").
The te-form has a bunch of different uses, but in the case of "verb-te verb", if the second verb is not one of a list of special verbs (of which miru (見る, to see) is one), X-te Y normally means "X and Y". For example, yorugohan o tsukutte taberu (夜ご飯を作って食べる) means "(to/I/we/you/...) make dinner and eat it": yorugohan is dinner, the "o" is a particle marking the direct object, tsukuru means to make (becomes tsukutte in the te-form) and taberu means to eat. (The first word in English is ambiguous because grammatical subjects are usually optional in Japanese, plus its verbs are not inflected for person or number.)
For a number of verbs, however, if they are in the second position, the phrase gets a special meaning. If it's miru, e.g. tsukutte miru, it means "to try to make" — or perhaps more aptly, "to try and make". If it's iku (行く, to go), it means "to go X-ing": tabete iku (where taberu (to eat) -> tabete in the te-form) is "to go to eat [something]", or perhaps: "to go and eat [something]".
Not all such special verbs correspond to English pseudocoordination though; a common one is shimau (the dictionary says "to finish / to stop", but it's uncommon in bare form), where e.g. tabete shimau means "to finish eating" or "to end up eating" / "to eat accidentally" depending on context.
The analogy between English and Japanese here is likely coincidental, but it's amusing nevertheless.
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It's an interesting coincidence, but I think there is a reason that the te-form in Japanese is much more fruitful than "and" in English in producing these constructs. Japanese verbs have too conjunctive forms: te-form and ren'youkei[1] (continuative form). Ren'youkei、 is more formal and has a different but overlapping range of conditions in which it can be used. The "te-form" itself was originally[2] just the ren'youkei conjugation of a special auxiliary verb "tsu", that is used to mark a completed action.
Neither of these forms is nearly as flexible as the conjunction "and" in English. For one, they can only connect verbs and one class of adjectives, but another important point is that the actions described by the verbs need to occur sequentially in time, with the action marked by '-te' occuring earlier. You cannot use either of these forms to say something like "The dog kept jumping and wagging its tail" or "It's important to both eat and drink".
If we compare this to how linguists define "pseudocoordination" in English and other Germanic languages, then every instance of the te-form or ren'youkei in Japanese is pseudocoordination and not real coordination: you cannot reorder the verbs freely, you cannot add "both", and you can use an interrogative pronoun. Since these limitations apply to every use of the te-form and ren'youkei, not just the "special case" ones, it makes these form more amenable for building special construct. Add the fact that Japanese does not have an infinitive form, and you end up with either of these forms as the most natural way to attach auxiliary verbs in Japanese.
Now you end up with a plethora of constructions (demonstrated with the verb 作る tsukuru "to make"):
作ってみる tsukutte miru (make and see) try to make
作ってみせる tsukutte miseru (make and show) prove that [I] can make it
作っていく tsukutte iku (make and go) gradually make (or make more and more)
作ってしまう tsukutte shimau (make and complete) finish making or "oh shit he really ended up making that" (the MORE common meaning in this case)
作ってください tsukutte kudasai (make and give (imperative)) Please make
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/v08pbp/brief...
Funnily enough, this has resulted in people saying things like "見てみましょう" and "見てみてください", which confused me at first. But I suppose this is like non-native English speakers being confused by the extra "do" in phrases like "I already did do my work."
Hungarian works the same, well I guess the few agglutinative languages do share this element
This is a nice explanation; I wish that duolingo hadn't removed their user comment/explanation section, which used to contain similar (though not always correct, which is probably part of why they removed them.)