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I want to say I did something because of more than one reason. For example:

I stayed home so I could study AND feed the dog.

I'm not sure how to name the reasons in Japanese. How I'm trying to say it:

Benkyoushite inu ni esa o yate kara ie ni imashita.

Is it right? Is there a better way to say it?

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2 Answers 2

up vote 6 down vote accepted
  • When you want to express a purpose for doing something, you can use ために. You used kara, and that is completely wrong. Accordingly, you shouldn't need the form for やる, but you seem to be having it: you have yate, and this conjugation is wrong anyway. If you wanted the form of やる, it is not yate but is yatte.
  • When you want to connect predicates in Japanese, there is not counterpart to the English and in Japanese, so you would rather have to use the counterpart to the English participial construction in Japanese, that is ...て.... You seem to be understanding that correctly.

You should have:


Notice that this implies temporal order, that is, you first study, and then feed the dog. If you do not want to imply this, then you should use the construction that istrasci comments below.

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You could also say 〜たり〜たりするために, but this would imply there were other reasons you stayed home as well, but did not want to list exhaustively. – istrasci Mar 21 '12 at 17:56

Just adding to sawa's reply and itrasci's comment.

If you wanted to exhaustively list your reasons for staying at home without the temporal relation that sawa mentions, you could duplicate the ため

Benkyō suru tame to inu ni esa wo yaru tame ni ie ni imashita

But this sounds a bit over-explicit. The most idiomatic way would probably be to turn the verbs into nouns to make the と more natural

Benkyō to inu no esayari no tame ni ie ni imashita

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Considering this point, you may also want to provide an answer to this question, as it is seems to be (at least some what) related and none of the answers provided seem adequate. – Miguel Mar 23 '12 at 22:26

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