I want to write the expression
I saw various science-fiction, thrillers and war movies last week.
in this way
The movies I saw last week, they were science-fiction, thrillers and war movies.
or
The courses I took at Y university, they were course1, course2 etc.
Do I need a comma after week and university in the expressions above?
Best Answer
Before I answer your question, I should mention that the sentence structure you're using here ( These things, they were _____ .) is pretty common in East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean). In English, however, it's not -- and I'm not sure that it's grammatically correct, to be honest. Mind you, I'm not sure that it's incorrect either, but it is definitely not in regular usage.
In English, we drop the "he/she/it/they/you" that follows the comma in question -- and in turn, drop the comma, too. So--
This becomes:
Likewise, for your second example--
This becomes:
That's how you'd go about writing those out properly. If these sentences were spoken, it wouldn't be unheard of (ha, pun!) to hear a sentence like that, but that's because the pause following "week" and "university" (the comma) could just as easily be pauses as the speaker thinks for a moment to recall WHICH movies they had seen, and WHICH courses they had taken. By the time they finished recalling the movies/courses, they might decide that it would make more sense to use "they" instead of mentioning the subject again, to save time.