Should I be more focused on learning just everyday natural speech?

6 comments

1. any reason for learning ‘everyday natural speech’ if you are not able to visit japan?

2. i have no idea why some people say that ます/です is “formal” it’s just polite, you can be polite without being formal, and you can be formal without being polite.

   look, textbooks introduce basic keigo (honorific language – eg 参ります) as a byproduct of the japanese economic bubble that happened till earlier half of the 90s, so you could use hyperpolite japanese even being a outside-company worker, it worked fine because you don’t needed full fledged knowledge in keigo to interact with work peers at least in a basic level, if you don’t want to work with japanese people i don’t see why it would hold you, but learning the everyday polite ます would be enough to most online situations with people who really want to interact without work relations just for everyday talking until you notice that you can switch to full casual mode.

3. What are you learning Japanese for? Even just watching dramas and movies, you will encounter all levels of speech so anything you learn will be useful, but you might as well spend some time on casual spoken language for a while if that’s what you want to work on.

4. Everyday natural speech requires grammar and vocabulary as well as common knowledge and shared background information. Yes it’s a good idea to focus on learning those things.

   >unnecessary advanced formality

   What exactly do you have in mind? Do you never talk to someone older than you that you don’t know well or about your friend’s deceased grandmother?

   edit;

   >I will never be able to visit Japan or work with anyone Japanese.

   Don’t count on it because with the decrease in wages, Japan will be nearly as cheap as Southeast Asia to travel to and many of us will be working abroad for better pay in ten years or so.

5. So here’s my approach generally to speaking:

   You have to know the rules before you can break them

   Regardless of language, natural casual speech is all about knowing which grammar/social rules to break when. For example, in English you need to have a subject in your sentence. Unlike other languages (Japanese) where explicitly stating the subject is optional, in English it’s not. That’s fairly basic English. But then we get into casual speech and we see the following situation:

   *roommate puts on shoes*

   You: What are you doing?

   Roommate: Going to the store

   Here we have a case where the subject gets dropped! Despite English needing explicit subjects! If a beginner level English student saw this exchange, they might assume, “Ah, in casual English, it seems you don’t need to use a subject!” Our hypothetical English student then ends up walking around dropping subjects left and right. “Did see a movie last night? Thought it was funny. Will go to class now. Bye!” The reality is that the rules around when you can drop subjects in English is way more nuanced, and it’s not used as often as our hypothetical English student thinks.

   So when it comes to language learning, if you have particularly good observational skills and are good at noticing patterns, you can pick up natural casual speech just from observation, with no study of the standard form of the language. However, chances are much higher that you’ll end up generalizing too much and misunderstanding a lot. If you have a stronger foundation in the basics of the language, it’ll then be easier for you to start picking up casual speech and noticing which rules are ok to break when (and by whom)

   That said though, I do think Japanese beginner textbooks introduce business formal language (sonkeigo and kenjyogo) wayyyyy too early. Imo it should only be taught as “phrases you might here from the store clerk,” at the N4 level, “phrases you might need to use at your part time job as a store clerk” at the N3 level, and only at the N2 level should you start to actually study how to use it in depth. I’m convinced the overly early introduction to business formal language is a hold over from the 80s and 90s when most people wanting to learn Japanese where people looking to do business in Japan

6. If you only want to speak at a basic level, audio courses such as Pimsleur and Assimil may be useful.