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私たちはこの時代に生きていて邪悪さがいよいよ増していることを知っています。
I was given this sentence from a friend and I'm having trouble with the extra て in 生きていて。
Could someone explain what grammar is being used here? Why it needed the next Te for this enduring state?
I would have translated it more 私たちはこの時代に生きているのが邪悪さがいよいよ増していることを知っています。< Probably wrong, I'm still new to Japanese.
Any explanations as to how this sentence works would be much appreciated!
生きる is the verb "to live", whereas 生きている means "to be living", as you correctly guessed.
Using 生きているのが leads to some problems. This の makes the verb to a noun, which becomes the subject due to が. But in the following you don't use it as subject.
Using the te-form instead solves that problem, as it breaks the sentence down in two meaningful parts: The one part is "We are living in these times", the other is "We know that the wickedness is steadily increasing". The grammar point used here is that you can connect sentences to one large sentence with the te-form.
Looks to me to be just the て that joins clauses i.e. verb-A-て verb-B
do verb-A and do verb-B
or,
during the act of verb-A, verb-B
The latter option seems to work better here.
Living in these times, we know that wickedness is increasing more and more.
