Fun with Japanese – Intermediate

In Japanese culture what is not said is often just as important, if not more important than what is said. Aptly enough it’s language helps facilitate this with grammar points like today’s point, “such as”.

Consider the following:

Today I met with an old friend and we went out for a beer, played cards, and he lost his car in a bet.

There are many cases in which you might want to tell somebody what you did for the day, but not say everything. Your friend’s significant other might be so happy to hear that he lost his car. Especially from you. So perhaps it’s best you don’t say it. If asked directly about what you did that day, you are put in-between a rock and hard-spot. Or at least you were until you learned about our new best friend 「たり」
Let’s see if we can use 「たり」to make things a little bit less…exact. Still factual, but less exact.

今日は昔の友達と会って、ビールを飲みに行ったり、トランプをしたりしました。
きょう は　むかし　の　ともだち　と　あって、ビール　を　のみにいったり、トランプしたりしました。
Today I met an old friend and we did things such as going for a beer, and playing cards.

See how much more innocent that sounds? Nothing about losing a car in a 1000:1 or anything and still factually ok.

「たり」is a conjugation of the 「て」form verb. As you probably know, you can use a series of 「て」 form verbs to express a sequence or series of events. I used it above with the verb 会う. I met my old friend and , or other way to thing about it I met my old friend then we went out for drinks.

To get to the 「たり」form simply replace the 「て」with 「たり」 and you have a valid verb. Let’s look at a few examples:

食べる　＝＞　食べて　＝＞　食べたり “such as eating…”
テニスをする ＝＞　テニスをして　＝＞　テニスをしたり “such as playing tennis…”

You get the idea. Very straight forward. What’s more, we could even modify our original sentence and remove any sequential ordering of events.

今日は昔の友達と会ったり、ビールを飲みに行ったり、トランプをしたりしました。
Today I did things such as meeting an old friend, going to drink a beer, and playing cards.

「たり」does take a little bit of practice to get the hang of, but once you can begin saying things less directly which is good step towards more natural sounding Japanese.