～たり～たり vs て Form for Listing a Sequence of Actions

Introduction

I take a potato chip,… and I eat it. I take a selfie… and I delete it.

Last time we talked about listing nouns, but listing sequences of actions is an important skill to foster as well. Don’t believe me? Well, if you don’t list your actions properly, you might accidentally end up telling everyone that you tooted before you left the room, and not the other way around. Scandalous!

I Did All Sorts Of Things! And In No Specific Order!

Structure

• 

  Past Tense Verb(た)りする
  Example:
  → 週末しゅうまつはいつもお菓子かしを食たべたりする。
  ”I always do stuff like eating snacks on the weekend.”

So, remember how we can use て-form to list events that happen one after the other, or at the same time? Here’s a refresher of what that looks like: