Bennity wrote:Thanks, that helps a little, but I'm still confused on how the "de" becomes "and".
で here is the te-form of the copula だ/です. One of the uses of the te-form is to connect sentences together. For example, say we have these 2 English sentences and we want to translate them:
"Mary is a college student."
"Mary's hair is orange."
You could do this as 2 seperate sentences:
メリーさんは大学生(だいがくせい)です。
メリーさんの髪(かみ)がオレンジです。
But it would probably sound more natural to combine them. We can do this by using the te-form of です in the first sentence, and putting the 2nd sentence after it:
メリーさんは大学生(だいがくせい)で、髪(かみ)がオレンジです。
Note that we don't need メリーの in the 2nd phrase since it's implied by the first. There's theoretically no limit to the number of phrases you can connect by using the te-form. Let's add her age to the end.
メリーさんは大学生(だいがくせい)で、髪(かみ)がオレンジで、21歳(さい)です。
Does that help?