Inexhaustive verb lists with ~たり
You may have come across the や particle in a list of nouns. It's used when listing nouns inexhaustively; that is, when listing examples without every case. Its counterpart is と, for exhaustive listing of nouns.
や and と can only be used with nouns though. What if we wanted to list verbs incompletely? For example, if I was asked what I did yesterday and I wanted to provide a list of some examples of things I did. For this, you'd use たり.
自転車に乗ったり寝たりました (じてんしゃにのったりねたりました) - I rode my bike and slept (among other things)1
You can actually use たり with both verbs, nouns and adjectives. But I am too tired to expound, so please look at the further reading section!
Further reading:
- ignore the fact this is an accurate and complete summation of all I did yesterday↩