Talkin' bout Senpai, Kouhai, and Keigo w/crimsoniglooさん

http://www.youtube.com/user/crimsonigloo

Japanese language or culture questions?

crimsonigloo and I are pooling our resources. You want in? Make a response vid, or get active in the comments!

If there are any native speakers out there who can fact check my nonsense, please help, or I'm gonna tell her about the ANCIENT KOUHAI tradition of buying yakisoba pan for your Senpai, EVERY DAY.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• bobbyjudo
• crimsonigloo
• senpai
• kouhai
• learn
• japanese
• keigo
• polite
• speech
• Japan
• 日本語

[crimsonigloo]

Thank you so much for this Jeff! I can't wait for the next videos! ^_^ [x]

[bestiaccia]

Very interesting questions and answers!

[beckomobil]

its a good answer. Cant disagree with that

[HoseiTutor]

@learning japanese is not your education or career... it´s just something you do, like a hobby.

[beckomobil]

I have a question.I really wanna learn japanese,cuz I like the way it sounds,but many ppl told me that I would never be able to get a job with japanese or do something like that.In other words, why should the people(including myself) learn japanese? Where can I use that knowledge afterwards?

[lessdone]

No problem, I was just surprised at the extended reply. I merely intended to contribute examples I personally found useful in a more formal setting instead of covering a lot of ground. I agree there are are multiple contexts and nuances but I rather thought that would be beyond the scope of this comment section. Since I picked up Japanese and English from childhood and from using it at work, my grammatical analysis is more "if it sounds right" sort of thing, sorry.

[bobbyjudo]

おら！ごめんなさい！ぜんぜんイラッとしていませんでした。「「­結構です」という表現は警護」を読んで、少し違和感がしましたの­で、興味深くて調べただけです。

いい勉強になりました。

嫌な気分をさせて、申し訳ない～す！

[lessdone]

イラッとしてるの？

[lessdone]

your right, it could be a contextually more polite form but not categorically keigo.

[bobbyjudo]

In the same way, your itadakimasu could be politely assertive, in your examples, just plain polite as in "gochumon wo kakunin sasete itadakimasu" (I don't see anything assertive about saying "I'm going to confirm your order.", and I can imagine situations or tones of voice that would turn "yarasete itadakimasu" into fighting words.

It's all relative...

[bobbyjudo]

They said depending on the situation, a subordinate could use it to a superior, or vice versa, which makes it hard to classify. They said it was a very aimai issue, but calling it keigo is an error.

Even more interesting for me was that they said there's no terminology for phrases that get used only in the superior to subordinate direction, like ご苦労様です。

Like all things in Japanese, it's not so much the words you use as the context. Kekkou can be polite or it can be cold.

[bobbyjudo]

I took your comment to a handful of Japanese teachers (in the sense that they are Japanese, and they teach Japanese to Japanese people) cause no one else I asked knew that much about it.

The general consensus was that "kekkou desu," while polite, is not keigo. It doesn't fall into any of the three main categories of keigo, nor is it bikago or teichogo...

One teacher said if you had to call it something, it could be teineigo, which technically is a kind of keigo, but she wasn't happy with that.