Is it acceptable to not use affeminate language even though I am a female?

11 comments

1. Hmmm, what is a feminine word? What kind of things, for example?

2. The 僕 or 俺 Girls exist not only as an anime archetype, but actually exist. You will get weird looks 100%, but saying it is not unheard of.

3. As a girl who felt very similar and only recently started to use more 女性語 when speaking Japanese, there’s absolutely no problem with using 女性語 or 男性語. I feel like fem/masc language is also more used in casual scenarios, where whoever you’re speaking with isn’t going to care too much about e.g. whether you say わ as a sentence ending or say うまい instead of おいしい (plus, go to somewhere like Osaka where men often use わ and girls often use うまい – Kansai dialect is fun like that). Speak how you feel comfortable speaking!

4. Not really, as often the subject is omitted in speech, people will think tht you are talking about someone else, a male. I asked ppl what would you think if I referred to myself as Boku, they said that they would think I was talking about my boyfriend. (><)

5. You’re overthinking it. You do you.

6. I’m a woman in my late 30s in Japan, I’ve been living in Japan since I was in my early 20s, and for women my age and younger, I don’t hear much overly feminine speech. You’ll learn in the textbook that women say わ and かしら on the end of sentences and such, but in my experience honestly I’ve only ever heard 50+ year old women talk very femininely like that. For women my age and younger, speech is pretty neutral. I personally keep my speech gender neutral and don’t use language that I know is masculine, such as 僕、俺、etc but some women do, especially very young women. My daughter and all of her friends say 僕 even though they are outwardly girly girls. I worked at an all girls school and heard masculine Japanese from a lot of students there.

   And something that surprised me that I didn’t learn in Japanese class is in my area of Japan, わ is a masculine sentence ending particle. Intonation is different from the feminine わ but it’s extremely common for men. In fact, when I tried to use わ in a text message to sound more feminine, it was *the only* time my Japanese has ever been called out as masculine. I responded to an invitation from a guy I liked saying 行くわ and he said, “Wow you talk like a guy 面白いね！” I also heard a guy I liked from a different part of Japan use かしら. I asked him why and he said because when he’s talking to women he wants to sound more gentle. So it’s not just about who you are, but also where you’re from, who you’re talking to, etc.

7. like other people have said, you definitely don’t have to, and it’s not as common among younger people anyway.

   keep in mind that if you’re not very fluent at japanese in the first place, your conscious choice to not use feminine language may be perceived as an error, and people may attempt to “correct” you with more feminine phrasings (would be a bit weird but not at all unthinkable) because they assume you just don’t know better.

8. Those stereotypical Japanese speaking style denoting the speaker’s gender, is often heavily used in literature, are mostly dead today.

   Besides, you need to have deep understanding of Japanese language and culture to perfectly use those speaking style. There are styles only used between young girls, speaking to middle aged women, young boyfriend, middle aged man, parents, teacher etc.

   The odds are, if you are posting a question like this, you’re still not very good enough at Japanese language and culture to use these style naturally.

9. People will think you learned incorrectly from a man and/or think you’re weird for trying to stand out but go ahead i guess

10. You could just use neutral language. You aren’t forced into either/or feminine-sounding or masculine-sounding language.

11. Might wanna look into the demigirl label.