The Hitchhiker's guide to Real Japanese

Dear Leebo, I am sure Ami did not intend to insult you or intentionally imply that your japanese is substandard. English is a foreign language for her as well as for me and the nuances are sometimes very subtle.

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Thank you for pointing out that I sounded offensive, that really is because I don’t master the nuances of English very well. If you could tell me where exactly I went wrong I would be very happy to apologize and correct it…

Btw I am not German but Austrian. I found learning material from the university of Duisburg accidentally and downloaded it from their server. It is a collection of pdfs and the final chapter is about casual speech, a topic that is hardly mentioned in other textbooks. If you give me a mail address I can send the whole package to you. It is very useful because the teacher is explaining the grammar very well. And it’s German :sweat_smile:

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I added the wink to show I wasn’t actually upset. The implication though was that if someone thinks they’ve heard uninverted Japanese spoken to them it’s because they’re not good enough at Japanese for natives to use real Japanese around them. (I don’t know that being a native English speaker or not changes the core of that.)

I disagree, and the comment with the wink was just me being sassy about it. Sorry for that.

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This level of absolutism is what gets your post criticized. No matter what level you are in Japanese, you know for sure that this statement is wrong. Being this absolute makes it very easy to be criticized as all it takes is one counter-example to dismiss your input entirely and this opens the door to anecdotes being rightly presented as an “oh yeah?”.

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Then please give me an example of a neutral spoken Japanese sentence. Just one is enough.
Because in my understanding you always choose a level of formal/ informal by saying even one word.

Can you also clap with one hand?

My mention of “neutral” was about “lacking emphasis”, not about a hypothetical register completely between formal and casual. Perhaps that’s where the confusion has been coming from.

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Maybe that’s a bit off topic now but I am starting to wonder if in really casual communication there is a sentence you say without wanting to emphasize a part of it? If you don’t have to Smalltalk (and that’s already a bit more formal) usually you just say something because you feel an urge to do so. Like little kids speak. They just say what immediately comes to their minds. But I agree that this is on the very extreme of casualness. Emotions translated into words.

猫か?
はい、猫。
良い天気だ。
それは危ないです。
それでは、中立的な日本語の文章の例を教えてください。(thanks Google)
片手で拍手している。(thanks Google)

Yes, these are very simple grammatically, which makes my examples disingenuous. But the problem with absolutes is that there is no reason I can’t put them forward.

Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if I even made mistakes in the sentences, given my level, but contesting absolute statements rarely requires any level of expertise.

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“did he make it to the meeting today?”
“he did.”

Both of those sentences are “casual”. Neither has any emphasis :thinking:.

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If the overall message is

“If you never use inversion, it’s likely your Japanese will be perceived as unnatural at times.”

I can definitely get behind that. It’s a tool that is available, and natives make use of any tools that are appropriate for expressing precisely the nuance they want to express.

To me it felt like the message was

“You should always use inversion to be percieved as natural.”

“Not never” is very different from “always” and so maybe I misinterpreted the core message.

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You are right my initial idea was wrong. I think it is like you say a tool that gives you the ability to sound VERY casual. But that does not mean anyone is using it constantly or you have to use it in order to sound natural. If you want for some reason to sound very casual than you (I think at least so) have to use it to a certain extent.

Thank you for your input, I think of spoken Japanese now really as a graduation from 0 (casual/ Honne) to 100 (formal/ Tatemae) and my initial post is a tool to go down to a very low number without learning a lot, it is kind of effective and easy to handle (if you want to of course).

But please let my bad explanation not hinder you to use it in reality, it is fun to have this kind of conversations in Japanese!

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Thank you for your effort. Probably our definition on what neutral is is different. I am trying to talk about the phenomenon that Japanese has this gradient of casual to formal that is expressed by the grammar and words used and as soon as you use words and grammar you position yourself on a certain point along that line, you cannot not position yourself.

I don’t know how much of Japanese you have learned so far but both the normal tense (猫か?) and the desu masu tense is placing you in a certain context.

In English it is not clear if you are eg talking to your kid or your boss, in Japanese you can’t say this sentence without that context.

彼は今日の会議に間に合いましたか。
sounds fairly neutral but if “he” is your boss and you are talking to your colleague it would be very rude, but if “he” is your classmate and you are talking to your classmate it would be very strange and too formal.

That’s what I mean with there is no neutral spoken Japanese.

Thanks for sharing this! It’s something I’d seen crop up from time to time in dialogue etc but had never read an explanation of why so its very useful to :slight_smile:

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This might be it. I’m understanding neutral to mean neutrality of emphasis wrt word order. Not neutrality of formality wrt to grammar.

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The problem with this type of “real” Japanese is that there is not really a scientific approach to it I think.
That’s why I tried to give this thread a bit nonsensical name.
It is during communication with you that it becomes more clear on how to use this let’s say tool and how to explain when to use it.

Nonetheless it is real and it is useful, and I think there are more topics out there that help us to get better at Japanese (outside the JLPT) and honestly I could not think about another place than a forum like this one to discuss these let’s say observations.

The pitch accent discussion eg was helping me a lot so I am just trying to contribute something back to the community.

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I would love to. Is there a way that I can send you a private message? Sorry, I am still a newbie and also, I’m really bad with (I s*** at) computers…

No way on this platform.

Weird choice of location to relieve yourself :eyes:.

I would love to do that in private conversation

Wanikani is beeing difficult…