First I thought to myself, "I seem to use too many commas." Now I'm no writer, but I've noticed that professional writers (and editors) clearly use less commas than I do.

For example, here's a sentence in a book that I'm reading: “As the victim was usually unconscious it was obvious they were totally reliant upon third parties and whatever action they took would determine their fate.”

I thought it was interesting, because I would've put a comma after "unconscious" and a comma before "and."

So, I found this helpful resource on grammar rules: https://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/commas.asp. 4a and 5b in particular were situations where I learned I could get rid of commas.

Still however, in the example sentence above, you'd think to put a comma before the "and" to separate the two clauses. I haven't found an explanation for omitting it, other than some writers are grammatically correct in a stricter sense, and others use commas more stylistically.

Is the use of commas more of an art, if you will, than I thought? How do you use commas personally?

Interested to read others' opinions!

So,this has been on my mind for a long time and i have tried some available/widely known methods to learn japanese language.So far iam not satisfied with my results.Can someone suggest me some ways that worked for them preferably for free/cheap.The main problem is the letters or characters.i can comprehend and manage to speak a very basic levels of the language mainly from consuming media from japan,some duolingo and such.....
any and all advice is appreciated
Help me out guys

Every now and then, my Japanese class and I head out to sing karaoke. I've never really been a fan of karaoke, but perhaps that's because most karaoke libraries don't really have any of the songs I've learned and/or want to sing.

So does anyone have any recommendations for Japanese karaoke songs? I'm not mentioning my personal music taste to keep the topic general, but feel free to ask if you're interested in helping me in particular.

We have a language learner in our household and I am tired of listening to J-pop at random on road trips. Do any of you music lovers have japanese language songs or even better artists or bands you really like?

Thank you very much

I'm guessing that it might just be that Tildes is an English only site, but as an avid language learner, I'd love to have a place to see and post non-English discussions.

Is there a best practice for making a non-English discussion? Is it simply not allowed? Is it allowed but discouraged?

I committed an embarrassing gaffe today. I had ordered a keyboard online from a store from the Tyneside of north-eastern England: an area with a regional accent and dialect often referred to as ‘Geordie’. I habitually speak in a ‘home counties’ accent, which is sometimes regarded as a contemporary variety of received pronunciation (RP), though it sounds quite different to historical and conservative varieties of that accent. A salesman called me earlier to inform me that the keyboard I wanted was out of stock, but that they would be happy to refund me if I didn’t want to wait for new inventory. Seemingly between the accent difference and the poor audio quality inherent to phone calls I misinterpreted ‘keyboard’ as ‘cable’, insisting with increasing urgency that I have USB-C cables in plenty and that they needn’t worry about supplying one with the order. We both went about in circles for a few minutes until it dawned on me what I was doing, at which point intense embarrassment flushed over me. Oops!

Accent diversity in Britain is rich and regional. It's not hard to place where someone grew up based on their accent. Would you consider your country to be diverse in accents? Even so, are there instances of accent discrimination?