Ive been trying to immerse myself more into japanese culture and cinema .im currently watching a japanese netflix series (First Love). In order to really familiarize myself with the language.
That said. One of the characters said (in a casual sense)
大丈夫すか? “Are you okay?”
But to my understanding wouldnt it be
大丈夫ですか？
I know its common to omit some words in casual speech, this particular one puzzled me abit.
why has the で has been omitted and what purpose it serves to only leave す
Ive been learning japanese for about a month now , im familiar with my hiragana, katakana and few basic sentence structures ,aswell as a few basic kanji
Any help would be appreciated thank you 🙂
10 comments
It’s more 大丈夫っすか and this way of shortening is used by younger people (at least in my experience) to sound between polite and casual, or just cool depending on the situation.
I even saw one of my new grads using it in an office internal meeting, but I work for a pretty relaxed company. If you have been learning for a month, I don’t recommend trying this unless you can pull it off consistently without switching back and forth.
Shortening of です to make っす and then a further shortening to す. Japanese love to shorten their sentences.
It’s slang, mostly used by teenagers and young adults and never in a professional setting.
Just a truncated phrasing. Same thing as saying like s’alright instead of “it’s alright” or even “it is alright”
Although not the same in application and usage of course but you get my point I hope
Should be 大丈夫っすか
Just a stylish slang used by mostly young male who don’t want to sound too formal yet to preserve a certain level of politeness.
I use it even at work when talking to my senpai, but probably not to my manager or supervisor (at least not on purpose lol)
it s a short. you often hear おーすfor おはようございます。
I generally think of っす as something younger people say, but it’s been around for kind of a while now. For example, there’s a joke in the 2006 drama サプリ about the 20 somethings at the office saying that.
I feel like I have heard it occasionally used by people in their 30s in podcasts and such, which sort of makes sense, because a 20 something in 2006 would be around 40 now.
> know its common to omit some words in casual speech, this particular one puzzled me abit.
Answered your own question. It’s just simply easier to say. All languages have their ways of shortening things for ease of saying, and this is one common way it’s done in Japanese. That’s all.
For whatever it’s worth, I typically see it written as っス. I’ve been using it forever in casual speech; I guess I picked it up in the mid-2000s when I was a lot younger.
While it is associated with young people, as the other comments say, it actually dates back as far as at least 1954, according to Japanese Wikipedia.