Last night I was in an izakaya and was speaking to some locals. I'm not even n5 but they were super friendly and kept asking me questions in Japanese and helping me when I didn't know the word for something.
This one lady asked my age and I answered. I wanted to say "あなたは?" but didn't want to come across rude by 1- asking a woman her age and 2- using あなた.
What would an appropriate response be? Just to ask the question again to her or use something like お姉さんは instead of あなたは?
by Electronic_Amphibian
11 comments
Use the person’s last name, usually
E.g. 佐藤さんの方は？ (さとうさんのほうは)
I’ve been told by tutors that お姉さん works better for waitresses rather than お嬢さん.
Just mix up your sentence structure so you don’t always have to use anata! It’s like avoiding a pothole on the linguistic highway.
I usually use そちらは？
Definitely don’t go around calling people お姉さん until you’re perfectly aware of its nuance.
How about そちらは？
i would avoid asking the same question (about her age) as well. Not sure what this point of the conversation was this, but maybe i would say よろしくお願いします, or reply そうそうそう to her reply, or maybe change the topic or something like よくここに来ますか (do you come here often), or 好きな食べ物は? (what do you like to eat?) since you are at a izakaya.
I don’t even know why they teach あなた only to have you unlearn it afterwards.
“Name of the person + は?” is a good way to go about it. It’s like “and you?”
“あなたは?”in this case is perfectly fine.
It’s all about context.
The most common solution to this problem is to use kinship terms. So, depending on how old they are, you can address as onêsan, obasan, etc. Though to be honest this is its own minefield when you are addressing a woman especially.
e: I’ll also say that if you’re obviously not a native speaker of Japanese people are going to cut you a lot of slack for saying something in a slightly rude way so I would not sweat this too much
If I didn’t know someone’s name could I just say 友達は or would that be overly friendly? It comes to mind because in Spanish we say friend a lot when we don’t know someone’s name.