This is kind of an odd concept but I’ll try my best to explain it.
When writing or reading english, I notice the way sentences and paragraphs are constructed can be what I call smooth or abrupt.
For example :
I have a dog. His name is spot. Spot is brown.
Or
I have a brown dog named spot.
Both get the same information across but the second is smoother, to me anyway.
Does Japanese work this way as well?
4 comments
I don’t know exactly what you mean by smoothness but yes in Japanese statements can be broken up into a set of sentences or combined into a single sentence, exactly like in your example.
yeah, you can write hurky-jerky small unnatural sentences or super long flowing sentences, or any possible kind of sentence you can imagine in Japanese
In fact, there are even things you would never imagine, that you will encounter in written Japanese
read a lot first, and I mean a lot, and read things by different authors, and you will see everything and more
You may find when you begin learning, you are taught the short sentence patterns first because they are simpler, but as you learn you will be able to make longer, more complex sentences like your second example and beyond.
Here is an example for you.
This is a Japanese passage written at the JLPT N5 level, which consists of many short sentences.
“昨日、新しいゲームを買いました。ゲームはとても面白かったです。だから、夜から朝まで寝ないでゲームをしました。水も飲まないで、トイレにも行かないでゲームをしました。とても疲れました。今日はたくさん寝たいです”
However, a native speaker would typically combine these short sentences into longer ones like this:
“昨日新しいゲームを買ったんだけど、どっても面白くて、朝まで寝ないで水も飲まずトイレにも行かずやり続けた結果、めちゃくちゃ疲れた。今日はずっと寝たい。”