Compound Verbs in Japanese

It's been said (who knows where) that Japanese is 80% verb conjugation. In fact verbs are often entire grammatical sentences on their own. It can be difficult to get used to but it's actually a pretty cool feature of the language and makes your life easier later on. Take this sentence for instance.

Japanese: スコットがあまり失礼なことを言うのでサリーは怒って帰ってしまった。

Literally: Scott (subject marker) very rude thing (direct object verb marker) say because, sally (topic marker) angry and returned and finished/ended up.

Translation: Since Scott was very rude, Sally got mad and went home.

The sentence looks really complicated if you don't know much about Japanese grammar but let's take a quick look at the compound verb at the end. 怒って帰ってしまった。 There are 3 verbs in here. Okoru (to get angry), kaeru (to return), and shimau (to finish, close, complete). Shimau looks a little strange but it basically implies regret in this sentence. It wasn't a desirable thing for Sally to get upset and leave. You could leave the shimau verb off at the end. I'm not an expert but I believe that would imply that either you don't care that Sally left or that it was a desired result.

To chain them all together you basically put the first two verbs into "te" form. Te form is used to connect verbs into a compound. The final form of shiamu determines the tense of the entire sentence. In Japanese the final verb always determines tense. Since this is a past tense sentence it's conjugated into ta form. We end up with okotte-kaette-shimatta which is pronounced "oko * tay-ka-eh * te-she-ma * ta". The asterisk just means you make a slight pause. It's hard to explain but it's really simple when you hear it. Also, the asterisk is not a standard notation in textbooks I just made it up because it's easy to understand.

As you can see compound verbs in Japanese are pretty simple compared to the same expression in English.