there's a verb conjugation in japanese called the て form which, for simplicity's sake, you can consider to be roughly equivalent to a gerund (i.e., where 食べる is "to eat", 食べて is "eating"). because of a few different sound processes, the formation rule is different on different verb stems, so you have to memorize the pattern, and when we first learned it in community college our professor taught us a nonsense song that I will never, ever be able to get out of my head
lyrics:
い ち り 「って」 (i.e., godan verbs whose stem ends with い, ち, or り form the て form with って, e.g. 会う/会い ⇒ 会って）
び み に 「んで」
き 「いて」
ぎ 「いで」
し 「して」
起きます 「起きて」
行きます 「行って」
exception exception
