Spend 1 day on the 1000moji website and this won't be strange to you anymore. It's just a way to connect the two parts of the sentence but there's probably more nuance I don't care to learn at this time.

I thought this would be easy to point you to a rule but, eh. Maybe my web-search skills are just terrible.

Anyway, the masu-stem is call 連用形, which may help if you want to find a grammar explanation.

Pretty much every Japanese-language explanation of 連用形 is going to tell you early on that its basic purpose in life is to form compound sentences (searching on the term in isolation will locate several of those for you, including the Japanese wikipedia, if you're up to reading about Japanese grammar in Japanese.) Pretty much anything (stories, narration, etc.) in である style is going to use 連用形 for conjunctions in preference to the て form.

Stansfield123 wrote:

Living languages are inconsistent. Things that shouldn't be, are, and things that should be, aren't.

It's why I would never ever pick up on something like this, even though I am aware of no rule that allows for that て to be missing: I learned to accept things without questioning why.

The way to avoid errors is by not using bad sources, not by running everything by the rule books. As for asking on this site, you should probably trust the Core deck before you trust a message board.

This post makes no sense.  People gave the simple, correct answer but you come out with this "no rules, who cares!" post and then tell the OP not to trust the answers here.  Why are you even on the board?

Tzadeck wrote:

Yudantaiteki is right, if a bit harsh.

Which part is he right about? Claiming that strangers on a message board are more trustworthy than sentences put together by professionals at iKnow, or about completely misrepresenting what I wrote and then attacking his strawman?

I didn't say "no rules, who cares", I said expecting everything in Japanese to have a reason, and stopping your reviews, reading, listening, etc. every time you discover an inconsistency, just to find a rule that makes it make perfect sense, is a bad idea. Even if the OP did get the right answer in this case, it's still a bad idea to do that, and it's still better to accept things that don't make sense. Doesn't mean he shouldn't study grammar to help make the most common things make sense, but trying to make everything make sense is a bad idea.

He's also rude. I guess you disagree with that.

Please refrain from name-calling.

Last edited by Zgarbas (2013 March 19, 12:34 pm)

Stansfield123 wrote:

The way to avoid errors is by not using bad sources, not by running everything by the rule books. As for asking on this site, you should probably trust the Core deck before you trust a message board.

I get what you're saying, but in this case I wasn't sure if it was a typo by whoever typed up the core sentences to make the deck because there are a few cases where kanji usage is different from the original I think.

The sentence which the OP refers to is, of course, grammatically correct, but there are some things which come to mind when I read it.

1) When you use the pre-masu form, it is generally considered that you should also write a comma.
2) Maybe he wanted to say 組み合わせた instead which also makes sense resulting in a natural sentence.
3) Pre-masu form is often used in different kind of speeches, not in daily Japanese. The same is true for 色々な which is more of a speech/text word. People usually use 色んな in daily speech as it can be pronounced faster. In this way of thinking it would have made much sense if the 作りました was actually お作りしました (if the author was speaking to someone) or instead of 色々な花 we had 色々な種類の花 or even better - 様々な種類の花. In short, I wanted to say that the style in the OP's sentence is kind of mixed and not that good, from my point of view.

Last edited by Arupan (2013 March 20, 3:05 am)

I'm right in saying that I don't see why you want to spend time here if you think the posters are so untrustworthy that they shouldn't be asked questions about Japanese grammar.

bertoni wrote:

I don't think yudantaiteki's post was rude.  It was a bit harsh, but so was the post on which he was commenting.  If you can't take it, don't dish it out.

Well, I certainly don't think it was outrageous of him or anything, and I like yudantaiteki, but I can see myself being a bit miffed if someone responded like that to me upon me posting something a bit stupid.  I might say, "Hey man, I made a mistake, no reason to be so mean about it."

It's just that the sentence "Why are you even here?" is often used as a content-less insult, and his sentence was almost exactly that.  The way he rephrased it, "I don't see why you want to spend time here if you think the posters are so untrustworthy that they shouldn't be asked questions about Japanese grammar," sounds more like real criticism than an insult, so I think he could have phrased it closer to that at first.

Stansfield123 wrote:

Even if the OP did get the right answer in this case, it's still a bad idea to do that, and it's still better to accept things that don't make sense. Doesn't mean he shouldn't study grammar to help make the most common things make sense, but trying to make everything make sense is a bad idea.

What exactly is he trusting a contextless sentence without any explanation to teach him about the nuance of the expression? This is a good illustration of why you shouldn't blindly rely on isolated sentences. As the posters before you said, this point is something that can easily be found and understood using a grammar book. If it's an option, why deprive yourself of it?

I do think it's a bad idea to always try to apply a rule and some fancy linguistics vocab to everything, but in this case, and with most Japanese grammar, it's just really not that difficult to look up and understand. We're talking about "use it to do .... generally used in ... situations" type stuff. If you'd been familiar with the grammar you're giving advice on, you might have been able to see the merit in others' responses, even if you don't agree with them.