There are thousands of Japanese expressions that are very easy to confuse with similar sounds and overlapping purposes in discussion. It helps to think of them in their correct grammatical boxes in order to try and get some overall sense.
These different boxes (and some sub-boxes) are as follows:
(1) compound particles - these are often used in substitution for more simple particles to help make complex sentences more easy to understand. As such they would co-ordinate with the predicate (e.g. the relevant verb or adjective) and their choice may be limited depending on the very concerned etc. ni tsuite and ni taishite are simple examples.
(2) parallel particles - these function to join together nouns in parallel for use in longer noun phrases. There are a surprisingly large number! e.g. oyobi, narabi ni, de are, de are, to ii to ii etc
(3) Compound sentences - these expressions join to sentences that depend on each other into longer expressions. Sub classes are:
conditional expressions
reason and purpose expressions
paradoxical and comparative expressions
correlative and common action expressions
time expressions
(4) Conjunctions - these expressions do not join two simple sentences together to make a related compound sentence as the above expressions. However they do show a relationship between one sentence and the following sentence, where the relationship can be the same as found in compound sentences (e.g one of cause and effect etc). e.g. suru to, naze nara. However they also have wider uses - e.g. tadashi, nao, tsumari, kono you ni etc.
(5) toritate expressions - these expressions are used to imply an additional "plus alpha" meaning beyond the words or expressions as stated.
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