How do you connect verbs with 'and'?

[JockZon]

How do you connect verbs? There are so many different ways of saying 'and'. If you say that you want to do something AND something do you conjugate the verb as an i-adjective with kute? Because I have noticed that you use katta to express past tense.
見たくて　聞きたい

How do you connect verbs in nonpast and past indicative?

Thanks for answering

[Bueller_007]

How do you connect verbs? There are so many different ways of saying 'and'. If you say that you want to do something AND something do you conjugate the verb as an i-adjective with kute? Because I have noticed that you use katta to express past tense.
見たくて　聞きたい

Hmmm. Good question. I've never had to say this, so I'm not really sure... But I guess you might be able to say:
見たり聞いたりしたい
But something like 経験したい ("I want to experience.") would probably be more natural.

How do you connect verbs in nonpast and past indicative?

I'm not sure I know what you mean. "And" has many different meanings in English as well. Can you give me an example sentence? The example sentence that you gave above isn't actually about verbs, because you talk about "wanting to do" something, which changes it to an adjective question. 〜たい is an adjective.

Verbs are generally joined together with the -te form as you suggested. But the verb -te form is more difficult than the adjective -te form. Maybe this answers your question:
http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa031101c.htm

[Jason]

Ok, there are a couple of different things going on here. First, as far as I know you can't directly connect verbs that have different tenses, politeness levels, or affirmation/negation. At least not with the て-form. If you wanted to say, "I will watch and not listen", you can't say:

見て、聞かない。
聞かなくて、見る。

Because the te-form is neutral, it'll take on the properties of the last verb. So this first sentence actually says "I won't watch or listen." I don't think you can do it the 2nd way either since I think ～なくて has different implications. So what you have to do is use が or けれども/けれど/けど to form a constrast between the verbs. So you could say.

見るが聞かない。
見るけど聞かない。

You could also mix tenses like this and say "I didn't watch, but I will listen."

見なかったが聞く。

Now we get to the issue of connecting verbs about wanting to do something. The ～たい form of a verb is actually an i-adjective, and the same rules about connecting te-form verbs I mentioned above also apply to adjectives. So if you want to say "I want to watch and listen", you can simply connect them with the te-form like you would any other i-adjective.

見たくて、聞きたい。

Here are a few "mix and match" variations:

見たくないが聞きたい (I don't want to watch but I do want to listen)
見たくて、聞きたくない (I don't want to watch or listen)
見たいが聞きたくない (I want to watch but not listen).

Bueller-san's example, 見たり聞いたりしたい, means "I want to do things like watch and listen (among other things)." It has a much different nuance than the more direct kind of connecting I discussed above.

[Bueller_007]

見たくて、聞きたくない (I don't want to watch or listen)

Are you sure this one is right?

[Jason]

見たくて、聞きたくない (I don't want to watch or listen)

Are you sure this one is right?

Now that I look over it again, no I'm not.

[Bueller_007]

見たくて、聞きたくない (I don't want to watch or listen)

Are you sure this one is right?

Now that I look over it again, no I'm not.

Yeah, I'd guess 見たくなくて聞きたくない is more like it.

Incidentally, the reason that I said "見たり聞いたりしたい" is because using the -te form implies sequential ordering, or that the first verb is the reason for the second. (I guess that's not necessarily the case for -tai adjectives though...) Also, I did a quick Google search on Jockzon's 見たくて聞きたい phrase and it only turned up two hits. So I went with the -tari form. 見たり聞いたりしたい also only gets 290, but like I said, it is a pretty unusual thing to say in Japanese.

[JockZon]

Yeah but it is a verb in our native languages so I called it that way but I saw that the -tai form acted like a i-adjectiv because of the -katta form so I figured that you should use kute but my real question what to say like "I look and listen" or something like that.

Btw shouldn't "I don't want to watch or listen" be 見たくなくて、聞たくない？

[Bueller_007]

Yeah but it is a verb in our native languages so I called it that way but I saw that the -tai form acted like a i-adjectiv because of the -katta form so I figured that you should use kute but my real question what to say like "I want to look and listen" or something like that.

If you're talking about the same object of desire, I really don't know. I'd use the テレビを見たり聞いたりしたい form.

For DIFFERENT objects of desire, I guess it'd be like this:
テレビを見たくて、ラジオを聞きたい。

But that might imply that you want to do both of them at the same time, or that you want to watch TV and then listen to the radio.

You could try this to explicitly state that you want to do things at the same time:
テレビを見ながら、ラジオを聞きたい。

I really don't know how natural any of these are, but I'd say they'd be understood.

[JockZon]

Sorry, I have changed the post because it was not to express desire that I wanted. I want to express that I am doing that and that. I just typed wrong.

"I look and listen"

[Bueller_007]

Yeah but it is a verb in our native languages so I called it that way but I saw that the -tai form acted like a i-adjectiv because of the -katta form so I figured that you should use kute but my real question what to say like "I look and listen" or something like that.

Ah. You changed from "want to". The answer is much easier now, although it's still not clear which meaning of the English "and" you want explained.

テレビを見て、ピザを食べる (to watch TV and [then] eat pizza)
テレビを見ながら、ピザを食べる (to watch TV and eat pizza [at the same time])
テレビを見たり、ピザを食べたりする (to watch TV and eat pizza [in no particular order, and you may do some other stuff that you feel isn't important enough to bother mentioning])

[JockZon]

Well I look and listen at the same time

ありがとうございました