Japanese politeness

Thus far, you’ve learned the basics of constructing sentences in Japanese.

You know that when making a sentence, you must follow a subject-object-verb formula. You also know that Japanese uses particles and these particles follow the words they modify rather than precede them. Finally, you know that the subject, topic, or object must be denoted by particles such as wa (subject), ga (topic), and o (object). For example...

You may already be aware that there are two types of Japanese – polite and plain. Formal and informal. Casual and black tie, if you will. When studying travel guides and other tourist literature, chances are that all of the Japanese you see there is in polite form. It’s extremely easy to tell plain and polite apart. First, a little science...

When asked to name the most difficult languages to learn, most people would rank Japanese pretty high on that list. On the surface it seems to be an intimidating language, what with its strange kanji characters, quick mode of speech, and varying levels of “politeness.” What a lot of people don’t realize is that basic Japanese is actually relatively easy, and for at least three reasons...