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Originally Posted by KyleGoetz
No problem. If you go over to the Japanese Language subforum here, there's a thread where I screw up really bad. Really, really bad. And I've been studying Japanese for a long time, including attending university over there. It was really embarrassing, and I'm thinking about never helping people with Japanese again because it seems I'm not qualified to. (English, on the other hand, is my native language, and I used to be an ESL teacher.)
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Japanese language is very different from English. Learning Japanese is hard to native English speakers, and learning English is hard to Japanese.
My American friend started studying Japanese about ten years ago, and he used to say he would learn Japanese soon. But two years ago he came to Japan, and he was not able to speak a word in Japanese. He is a lawyer, and he must have believed he was smart, but he didn’t say a word in Japanese here. He seemed to have been shocked, and then he quit e-mailing me.
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"Quickly" is fine. If you want to be a bit more "descriptive," you can say something like "I snapped my eyes open" or "I snapped open my eyes" also. They sound more like you'd find in a novel, I think. More like storytelling because they are more visual. It is commonly taught in story-writing classes that you should never use an adjective where a verb would do. In other words, if you're writing a story, use a descriptive verb instead of an -ly word. In this case, we could switch "quickly opened" with "snapped open."
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I see. I understand what you mean.
Many of my favorite novelists don’t write many adverbs.
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Conjunctions are a tricky part about English, especially the rarer ones.
Ignore the advice on punctuation, though. There is confusion among native speakers as to whether to always put a comma before a conjunction. I was an editor on an academic publication, and this is the rule we used, basically:
When you have two complete sentences joined by a conjunction, use a comma before the conjunction.
Tom is happy, and he is tall. ("Tom is happy" and "He is tall" can be complete sentences)
However, otherwise, do not use a comma:
Tom is happy and is tall. ("Tom is happy" is a sentence, but "is tall" is not)
The link I provided said to always use a comma, which I think is wrong.
But that is writing style. The grammar description in that link is good I think.
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I will need a long time to read the rink. I will try.
KyleGoetz, thank you very much.
I’ve been studying English for many years, but my English is still poor. However, I will keep doing my best, for very good people help me here.
