It’s official. Japanese people can’t say いいえ. (On a more serious note, there are natural ways to say ‘no’ in spoken Japanese, but apparently いいえ is not one of them.)

31 comments

1. Some joke that in Japanese, yes means maybe. Maybe means no. No means “I’d rather eat a manhole with chopsticks while you’re dancing on top of it”.

2. Too bad they don’t include the numbers for いえ there.

3. That’s quite interesting. You definitely hear いいえ a fair bit in anime.

   Did those numbers represent conversations between all kinds of age demographics?

   Because most anime tends to be for kids/teenagers and the speech patterns tend to be a lot more child like or teenager like as well. So I wonder if actual kids and teenagers would be using いいえ more often, like anime does, or does anime separate from reality further in this case?

4. (i)ya should be on any list of negators.

   I’d say this list is prolly regional, and varies so much with gender and age that it would be hard to nail it down much.

   IIE is very much in the customer service vocabulary, though.

5. I usually don’t hear いいえ frequently. There are many other ways to say no. The worth mention here is when someone ojiisan suck air between the teeth. This usually means you are utterly wrong or you are holding your hashi wrong.

6. I’m not smart enough to find or read the study, does anyone know where the speech is from and what the numbers actually mean?

7. [Interesting reply](https://twitter.com/yhkondo/status/1543942465669185537) where a guy notes that in terms of written Japanese, the disparity is smaller (7647 vs 1952), so conversations where いいえ appear are more common by several orders of magnitude in written conversations (e.g. anime, manga, LNs, novels) as opposed to real ones

8. I wonder how common いいや is.

   Unfortunately the corpus they searched to get those numbers is not public and it seems impossible to apply to peruse it as a gaijin.

9. Is there such a list of most frequent words? Where can I find it? thank you.

10. I would love to see how this compares to “yes”, “no”, and other ways to say “no” in other languages. Like how frequently do we use it in English? Come to think of it, how often do we say “yes” compared to other forms?

    I know this is Japanese culture but it would be interesting to see how greatly Japan differs from other countries.

11. I’ve heard that いや is the more common way

12. iie

13. Given that a significant part of Japanese communication is implicit rather than explicit, it would be interesting (but of course impossible!) to see the same analysis done with implicit communication taken into account 🙂

14. Also, That Japanese Man Yuta made a video on that recently

15. I imagine the はい is inflated by it being an 相づち word (like backchanneling in English) .

16. 難しいです。

17. What kind of effort would it take to make いいえ trendy and cool?

18. I think I hear いいえ when people are talking to kids younger than 7 fairly regularly as a corrective statement. To hear it to an adult would be condescending as hell though.

19. A youtuber named “Japanese Ammo with Misa” covered this topic quite well in a video about a month ago called “No in Japanese (stop using いいえ) and it was a good informative watch

20. That’s mostly because いいえ isn’t the catch-all negative response that ‘no’ is. はい isn’t exactly equivalent to ‘yes’ either

21. ノー

22. いや too. Used all the time. And ううん

23. There is a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEvM_a3Hvqo) about why いいえ is seldom used. Although it is made in Chinese, Japanese subtitles are also available.

24. For stuff like computer interfaces it is de rigeur though. Similar pattern to あなた.

25. ある?

    ない。

26. Onomappu has a good video about this too. Bottom line is:

    いや = more casual

    いえ = more formal

    いいえ = don’t use

27. The problem is its not easy to compare English “no” to a single word in Japanese. In English: “Do you like it?” -> “No”. In Japanese (translated): “Like?” -> “Don’t like”

    Additionally いいえ is sometimes used as a replacement for どういたしまして。As in, “No problem”

28. Is this discrepancy to do with how はい is used as an affirmative interjection if you know what I mean.

    Just like a: “I follow what you’re saying so far”.

29. In greece you just never apologise for menial things, ie bumping into someone. ‘Sorry’ has very little weight. Just a random thing that came to mind reading this.

30. I live in Japan and more often than not I hear them say 難しい in place of いいえ. It’s a very non-confrontational and context sensitive society.

    (In a temple)

    Me : ここで、おにぎりを食べていいですか？

    Japanese person : *teeth sucking* それは難しいと思います (ie, no).

31. My wife just told me いいえ is more of a strong refusal. That’s about it.