I want to preface this by saying I don’t think this subject is of dire importance and I’m not anxious about learning the “wrong” Japanese. It’s just something I’m curious about. I believe that through exposure to human interaction and native content I can pick up the correct speaking habits even if my class is teaching it “wrong.” As long as I’m understanding the grammar and basic vocabulary I’m fine.
Often people complain that textbooks teach unnatural Japanese. This complaint is often made for other languages also. I never took these complaints too seriously, but yesterday I spoke to my college classmate who has relatives in Japan. He said all this polite Japanese is outdated and it’s not even used in a business setting that much. This surprised me and got me wondering.
Recently, I came across [this video from a Japanese speaker named Naito](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2XLodV2pW8) which says Japanese people rarely say いいえ. According to Naito, Japanese people are more likely to say いえ or いや, or just や, even in formal situations. This makes sense because fully pronouncing いいえ is a bit cumbersome, but it kind of blew my mind because none of the Japanese learning material I’ve come across has mentioned this fact about such commonly used term. Like many people, I have a horrible habit of buying a lot of books, looking at a lot of websites, and downloading a lot of apps (perhaps wasting more time looking for resources than actually studying…). And in everything I’ve looked at, nobody ever mentioned that いいえ is rarely used?
In a [recent follow up video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCUT4DtXM3M), Naito complains about being chastised by Japanese people for teaching foreigners the casual form of this word. Apparently Japanese people believe foreigners can’t be trusted to know when casual terms are appropriate (there’s probably some truth to that) so they don’t want to teach the casual form of いいえ at all. Another factor is Japanese people probably lack self awareness of how often they don’t use the full いいえ, just as English speakers aren’t aware of how often they drop the “t” in “don’t.”
I brought this up with my professor, and he said the other forms of the word are derived from the base word いいえ so that is what they teach. That makes sense, but I think someone should have a footnote about it’s actual real world usage.
So I made this thread because I want to hear from people who have more experience than I do, I’m curious about any insights into how polite and casual Japanese are used in real life.
by tesseracts