Category Archives: polite

Keep Your Ears Open – ご覧のスポンサー

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お預かりします is “get used to it.” よろしくお願いします is “get used to it.”

The essence of “get used to it” is finding those sentences that surround you in everyday life and learning how to use them/what they mean. It is beneficial to break the phrases down and see how they work, but try not to expend too much brain power or else you’ll be one of those freaks explaining the origin of saying “bless you” when someone sneezes. (Demons make you sneeze, of course, thus making you in need of a blessing. Duh.)

Saturday I was watching TV and saw one of these:

I’m sure you’ve all noticed it at some point. At different points in a show, generally just before a commercial break or the end of the show, the phrase 提供 (ていきょう) pops up on the screen with some company names underneath it. Then the voiceover announcer says 「ご覧のスポンサーの提供でお送りします。」

I believe ご覧 refers to the audience looking at the actual company names written on the screen, so literally “the sponsors you (honorably) see.” That combined with 提供 gives us “the contribution of the sponsors you (honorably) see.”

お送りします is the humble honorific of 送る (おくる), so that’s the television channel itself doing the sending, giving us, “We (humbly) send you (this show) via the contributions of the sponsors you (honorably) see.” Woo.

In English we’d probably say something like, “Brought to you by State Farm Insurance – Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is there!” That or "Support for Show X is provided by Chevy Trucks – Like a Rock."

Take it (for me)

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取ってください。

I steadfastly refused to believe that phrase existed for a long time. I’m not sure why. I think there was a barrier somewhere in my head blocking the logic connection. Getting used to it helped remove that barrier, and now I’m cool.

取る (とる) is often used with “take” verb patterns. Take vacation, take time, etc. So I think that prevented me from realizing that while it does mean take something (in this case, whatever object you are pointing at / put before it with を), but it also means “and give it to me.” Altogether it means “pass.” It’s one of those patterns you learn your first year in class, but for some reason I never got used to it until now. Maybe it has something to do with sharing a small apartment between a large number of people – it’s easier to pass things than to forever shuffle around すみませんing.

With friends you can say the casual 〜を取って, but make sure to add the ください at the office or with people significantly older than you.

I logged this entry under passive. Get it?

お疲れ様

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お疲れ様 (おつかれさま) might be the ultimate “get used to it” phrase. I hear it all the time these days – when anyone returns to the office from an outing we say it to them, I say it to everyone before I leave work, I say it to the guy who empties the trash, I say it to someone if they are leaving.

I’ve started saying it a lot more than I used to, partly because I hear it so much. I did hear it in Nishiaizu, too – when I paid my bills, after I got back from elementary school, when I left school – but it gets used a lot more now.

I guess it literally means something like “You look tired,” but a more accurate translation is, “Thank you for your efforts,” which I learned from Kitakata Alan. That effectively expresses the idea that it is a set phrase used when someone completes something. If you look at the times when it is said, it is generally at the point where one activity ends and another begins. You can emphasize this by making it past tense – お疲れさまでした. If, on the other hand, people are still working (i.e. the activity has not reached completion), then you can say お疲れさまです.

Perhaps the best, most ritualized example of this is at elementary school. The kids all do the cleaning themselves after lunch. Sixth graders run groups of kids from all grade levels. All the groups line up and begin cleaning by collectively yelling, お願いします. They end the cleaning by saying, ご苦労様（くろうさま）でした, which is just a more casual way of saying お疲れさまでした. I would always air on the side of お疲れさま, since it is more formal.

Try not to think of the meaning too much. Focus on the situation when it is being said and then try to notice when a similar occasion arises, so that you can use it. And say it a lot, just kind of throw it out there sometimes.

More Warning Signs

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I spent the last couple of months apartment hunting in Tokyo. At first I hoped to get my own apartment, but after realizing that would require an initial payment of $3000 plus to an agency, I started to look for a roomshare.

Fortunately, there are some nice websites out there. I replied to several ads and even put up one of my own. I ended up exchanging a lot of emails with Japanese people, and the thing that surprised me was that in nearly all cases, they began mails with 「last nameです」 or 「first nameです」, so 「田中です」 or 「洋平です」 This continued no matter how many emails we exchanged, which I thought was weird at first. Of course I knew who the person was. Did they really think I had forgotten?

I eventually started thinking of it in terms of airbag phrases; it’s just a polite way to begin a Japanese email, a warning sign of sorts, one that’s used on the phone as well. Does it require a translation or easily identifiable English equivalent? Hell no. Get used to it.

Airbag Expressions 2

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While I only remember two from the class, I’ve been collecting my own エアバッグ表現 ever since I learned the term.

I would put the following two terms in the same category: 〜ですが and 〜の件ですが. Both serve as a warning that you are about to address a certain subject, and with the right intonation and a slight pause after the が, you can convey the idea that you are about to raise a touchy subject. 件 literally means subject. For example, an interviewer might say:

「事務所費問題ですが、」 or 「少子化問題の件ですが、」

Both serve as a warning that the administrative office fees or declining birth rate will be the topic, giving the interviewee a small amount of extra time to organize his thoughts.

悪い（わるい）ですが is kind of the Japanese way of saying, “My bad” preemptively. 悪かったです is the way you would do a true “My bad.” I believe I used it successfully the other day in Himeji Station – 「悪いですが、両替（りょうがえ）もらえますか。」I was trying to store some luggage in a locker, but, as is often the case, there was no change machine. I approached a bento lady and said, “Sorry to ask, but could you change this bill?” She gave me a kind of reproachful grin but then handed me the coins anyway. Robin told me that he was yellow carded for inappropriate usage of 悪いですが. Apparently, it is used for people beneath you in the Japanese social hierarchy, so perhaps the lady was just pissed off that I was talking to her as though I were her boss. It does smack of someone in an authority position would use to explain slacking or some other mistake, so use with caution.

Airbag Expressions

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It’s easy to lose focus during language classes, especially once you’ve reached that level where the class is conducted exclusively in the target language. If you don’t maintain your concentration consistently, you’ll start to miss words here and there, the meaning of what the teacher is saying will start to fray, and eventually you’ll find yourself gazing out the window, wondering exactly why it is that airplanes don’t sink like stones.

My senior year Japanese professor was great at keeping everyone’s attention. She rotated between a variety of topics, even literature, and knew that to keep everyone’s attention it helps to be silly. I’ll never forget the way she played up her love for Yon-sama or the way she used to laugh whenever we said something silly. (On a quick, somewhat-related side note, nothing more effectively disarms and simultaneously entrances Japanese elementary school students than an English teacher who doesn’t care about looking or sounding like an idiot.)

One of the topics that she taught was “Airbag Expressions” (エアバッグ表現). This may be the single most useful thing I ever learned in a Japanese class.

Let me let that sink in…

THE SINGLE MOST USEFUL THING I EVER LEARNED IN CLASS!

She had a theory that requesting something of a Japanese person was the equivalent of a head-on collision; without deploying a proper linguistic buffer – the airbag – the Japanese person may be shocked beyond recovery, and it is unlikely you will ever get what you want.

She taught us a number of incredibly useful phrases that help warn Japanese people that you are about to ask for something and other ways to lighten the actual request itself. The two that I use most frequently are:　恐縮（きょうしゅく）ですが and （もし）ご迷惑（めいわく）でなければ、

恐縮 is a difficult word to translate into one word in English, so let’s look at the kanji themselves. 恐 means fear or awe, and 縮 means shrink, so when the speaker uses it, imagine him literally afraid of what he is going to ask for, shrinking away from the requestee. One of the nicest translation in English is “It’s terrible of me, but…” or “It’s terribly selfish of me, but…”

(There’s definitely an element of brushing away selfishness with the term; it’s often used as a response to heaps of praise: 「おめでとう！大変上手にできました」“Congratulations! You did a fantastic job” 「恐縮です」　“It was nothing.”)

So you could use it like so:

「恐縮ですが、来週の火曜日休ませていただいてよろしいですか。」

or

「恐縮ですが、ホチキスを貸してくださいませんか。」
(Although, maybe borrowing a stapler is not exactly weighty enough to call for a 恐縮.)

（もし）ご迷惑でなければ is a conditional clause. もし is not necessary, but it does help emphasize the fact that what you are about to say is conditional, and it reinforces the –ば. なければ seems confusing at first, but it’s just like あれば, really.

あれば = if something is/does X
なければ = if something is not/does not X

So, ご迷惑でなければ means, “If it isn’t a bother/trouble/problem…”

You can use this in almost identical situations as 恐縮, and you can even use them alongside each other:

「大変恐縮ですが、ご迷惑でなければ、推薦状を書いていただけませんでしょうか。」
“It’s terribly selfish of me to ask, but if it isn’t too much trouble, do you think you could write a recommendation for me?”

These are powerful expressions and should only be used for the most noble of purposes. Save them for a time when you need to make an extremely difficult request, one that might otherwise be denied. I am guilty of throwing these around too freely and have been trying to expand my set of エアバッグ表現 so that I have a larger selection to choose from. (「悪いですが、」, I choose you!)

Power Up Your いい

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Another short Wednesday post due to job interviews.

Mastering Japanese can sometimes be as simple as mastering the ladder of politeness – remembering which phrases are used for those high on the ladder and which are used for those lower on the ladder.

いい, as I mentioned last Friday, is often used to either ask permission or refuse something. It’s common courtesy to ask someone, 「いいですか。」 before you sit down next to them. (Notice how I didn’t use a question mark in that sentence. This is something else you should just get used to – you don’t need question marks all the time in Japanese.)

You can power up your いい by turning it into よろしい. This is a polite way to say いい. You can also power up your ですか by turning it into でしょうか. So here’s a little ladder for you.

よろしいでしょうか。
よろしいですか。
いいですか。
いい？／いいの？　(My spider sense tells me that this last one is all about the intonation and that will be easier to be understood as a question if you add the の.)

That’s in order of most polite to most casual. Notice that, as usual, the more syllables a phrase has, the more polite it is.

Friday Puzzle – Bugs are Fantastic Answer

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I give out stickers to kids at elementary school. We play karuta nearly every week, and when the kids have taken five cards, I allow them to choose one sticker from a stash that I accumulate whenever I go to Tokyo or happen to see cool stickers.

When I was in Australia, we passed a dollar store, so I stocked up on cool Aussie stickers. I got a bunch of flags and antipodean animals. They also had a big sheet filled with bugs, one with ladybugs and another with beetles.

Some of the boys liked these stickers, but I still haven’t given them all away. A month or so ago, a girl was trying to choose her sticker and I said, “How about a bug, mam?” 「虫はいかがでしょうか。」, purposely speaking a little over-politely to be funny. She replied in kind speaking slowly, “No bugs, thank you.” 「虫は、いいです。」

No one likes bugs. Except, of course, these crazy kids in Japan, but they’re mostly the elementary school kids…and the few junior high kids who still like them…and become adults who really like them.

So, no, bugs are not nice, good or cool. I’d rather have very little to do with them, thank you very much.

This use of いいですis the often overlooked refusal of something. Think about this conversation for a second:

A: Would you like anything else to eat?
B: No, thank you.

In English, we incorporate “thank you” into our refusals. I can’t tell you how many times my “No, thank you”s have been misconstrued as “Thank you? Well, here ya go!” (Perhaps because I mumble?) In Japanese, similarly, they incorporate a “good” word into a phrase of refusal – いい.

To make it clearer, you can attach a もう to the front of your いいです, implying that “(whatever you) already (have is) okay.” Okay might be the closest translation. So here are your phrases:

（もう）いいです。
（もう）けっこうです。

The second being a more polite version of the first. I think けっこう might be slightly easier to understand coming from a non-native speaker who, like myself, is probably messing up the intonation of the phrase.

Here’s a conversation I had on Wednesday for further reinforcement:

Konbini lady: 袋はいりますか。
Me: けっこうです。
K: いいですか。

You copy? In English it looks something like this:

K: Do you need a bag?
M: No, thank you.
K: You’re okay (without a bag)?

The lady wasn’t asking me if I was good or if I thought bags were nice or something, she was asking me if I was okay without a bag. An easy way to differentiate this usage of いいです from others is that this one will hardly ever, perhaps never, have anything in front of it. The other usage you will see constructed like this: 〜がいいです, with が directly expressing the subject of いい.

Robin wins again this week, with his answer, “somebody offered to put bugs in the girl’s lunch (you wouldn’t do that would you daniel?) and she was politely refusing them.”

How to Say No by Saying Yes

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Japanese people hate saying no. Not only do they hate saying no, they even hate using negative endings to verbs. This presents a problem for many foreigners, who upon arrival suddenly find that there are many things they would like very much not to do.

Well, have no fear, citizens, there is a wonderful Japanese word called 遠慮（えんりょ）. Encapsulated within these two tiny-yet-complex characters is a phrase with a built-in no. Yes, that’s right, by doing this verb you are actually not doing something.

For example, the following conversation:

Supervisor: ダニエル先生、あのう、来週飲み会ありますが、どうですか。
Daniel: あそうですか。誘ってくださってありがとうございます。残念ながら、今月お金がちょっとぎりぎりで、遠慮します。

Now, in English:

Supervisor: Hey Daniel, umm, there’s a drinking party next week. You in?
Daniel: Oh yeah? Thank you for inviting me. Unfortunately I’m a bit short with cash this month, so I’ll hold back.

If you wanted to get even more polite you could say, 遠慮させていただきます, and utilize the causative tense.

遠慮 literally means “to hold back” or “to be reserved,” something like that, but what it really means is no. It reminds me a lot of that scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where the captain says, “I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request.” The lady’s all like, WTF? and then he goes, “IT MEANS NO!”

遠慮 is Japanese code word for no. Everyone understands the meaning, and it can efficiently and politely be used to say “No thanks.”

(A side note:

It’s good practice to thank people for an invitation whether or not you accept or decline. That way the invitations will continue to come. )