I am beside myself. I forgot to include one of the most important and most useful examples of 伺う (ukagau, ask/hear/visit) in daily Japanese.
I wrote about 伺う last month in the newsletter and how it is a powerhouse 謙譲語 (kenjōgo, humble keigo) verb. It can mean to hear/learn something, to ask a question, and to visit someone. It’s especially useful in business environments, on phone calls, and here and there in your daily life.
But BY FAR the most useful way you can use 伺う is when you are asking someone’s name.
Beginner students will often resort to the extremely basic お名前は何ですか (O-namae wa nan desu ka, What is your name?), which is fine, I guess, but it makes the speaker sound like an elementary school student going down a list of questions for an assignment. Even the slightly more polite お名前は何でしょうか (O-namae wa nan deshō ka, What is your name?) with a softer ending isn’t that much better. It’s fundamentally too direct.
I don’t want to shame anyone for their Japanese level—because I know mine, while reliable, will absolutely dip in register to levels that might embarrass a junior high student—but at a certain point, we have to aim to do better, and one of the most effective ways of doing better is by memorizing and becoming familiar with set phrases so that eventually they feel lived-in and natural enough for us to use without any hesitancy.
That brings me to the phrase:
お名前を伺ってもいいですか (O-namae o ukagatte mo ii desu ka, May I ask your name?)
Drill this into your head!
You can opt to level it up by changing いい to よろしい and ですか to でしょうか, but even this basic phrase will serve you well.
I’ve found this especially useful when you’re in a conversation with someone and starting to get more comfortable/familiar but don’t yet know their name. Maybe at a bar or restaurant in your neighborhood that you’ve been to a few times. You know the bartender or マスター (masutaa, “master”/head) relatively well, but you don’t yet know their name. This is the way to ask it!
“Why would you need to know their name?” you might ask. Well, in Japanese someone’s surname is one of the most natural ways of saying “you” in Japanese. Just today, on the walk in to work from the station, I asked a coworker 田中さんは、この会社長いですか (Tanaka-san wa, kono kaisha nagai desu ka, Have you been at this company a long time?)
Knowing someone’s name opens up more natural modes of expression, and if you know the way to ask it without sounding like a child, I’d say that’s going to be a win that will compound into future linguistic victories.
I discussed this phrase in further detail at the end of the podcast this month. Give it a listen:
The core part of the podcast is about the word 修飾 (shūshoku, modifier/adjective) and one sentence from last month’s reading group in particular, which I wrote about over on the newsletter. Give it a read!
And here are links to the Murakami reviews I mention: