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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?
ために. You used kara, and that is completely wrong. Accordingly, you shouldn't need the て form for やる, but you seem to be having it: you have yate, and this conjugation is wrong anyway. If you wanted the て form of やる, it is not yate but is yatte.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:
勉強して犬に餌をやるために家にいました。
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.
〜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
勉強するためと犬に餌をやるために家にいました
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
勉強と犬の餌やりのために家にいました
Benkyō to inu no esayari no tame ni ie ni imashita
