I am trying to practice constructing sentences with words that I have learned. I wanted to say “Today was cloudy” but figured that instead of bothering to figure out how to say “cloudy” I’d just use words I already knew.
My first attempt was:
今日は、空に多い雲にあります。
Then I wasn’t sure if 今日 was the subject, or if that should be 雲.
What is the best way to construct this sentence?
今日is actually the topic, not the subject.
I would go with
今日は、空に雲が多かったです。
In which 今日 is the topic, 雲 is the subject, and the adjective 多い is conjugated in the past.
Would using ですinstead of あります be kind of like saying “there are clouds in the sky” instead of “the sky has clouds”?
I’m far from an expert and I could be wrong, but from what I’ve learned your sentence is not wrong, but it is weird, sort of like saying “many clouds were in the sky today”. Using 雲 as the subject and 多い as predicate seems more natural. A very literal translation of my sentence would be “as for today, in the sky the clouds were many”.
Just a tip: you use が when dealing with the subject of verbs of existence (ある and いる), so it would be: 今日は、空に多い雲があります。
Of course, @rodrigowaick’s version is also right- my intuition tells me that’s more natural as well. (I’m no grammar expert, so I’m probably way off.)
By the way, the word for cloudy is 曇り (くもり) so I think the correct way to say “today was cloudy” is 今日は曇りでした。
(でした is used only with the past tense for nouns/na-adjectives, and 曇り is a noun.)
You’re right, I hadn’t noticed the use of ni instead of ga.
Thanks so much! It kind of makes sense. I’ll need to study it out a little more 
Having lived in Japan for the last four years, I’ve noticed that foreign speakers (such as myself) want to make either literal translations from the way we would say it in English, or make complicated sentences with lots of sections. In contrast, the Japanese tend to use as few words as possible to convey meaning.
Thus, if my Japanese wife wanted to tell me that it was a cloudy day, she would simply say “今日、曇り” Often, she wouldn’t even bother to specify "今日” since it’s obvious that she’s talking about right now, rather than yesterday or tomorrow.
Native Japanese speakers rely heavily on people inferring unspoken parts of speech, which is definitely challenging for those of us already busy trying to figure out what the spoken stuff means. Haha!
今日の空はたくさんの雲が並んでいる〜
use 「並ぶ」instead of「 多い」because 「 多い」mainly for nuance like occasion eg. earthquake
Eh, this is the first example in weblio
「人口が多い」
Obviously, it’s used for occurrences too, but number is fine. I don’t know if it sounds natural for clouds specifically though.
human and countable is also fine forおおい〜 but in this case cloud is little weird in vast object in the sky so instead of 「many」in english terms it’s sounds natural as 「line up/stacked up」
again〜 collocation〜
Sure, just wanted to let people know that countable objects can be described as 多い to.
My personal approach would be 今日は全然晴れなかった。
First thing I thought of was
今日の空は雲が多い
but not sure how natural it sounds.
I like their approach a lot. Too many unnecessary words in some other languages.
To add to that, in my opinion saying 今日は曇りでした implies that unlike previous days and against expectations, today of all days was cloudy (or that there cloudiness spanned the entire day in a similar obnoxious manner).
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