Speaking casually

The first lesson of this course said that the plain form has a second job, as the ending of a casual sentence, and put it off. This is where it is collected. Casual Japanese is not polite Japanese with the endings removed and the rules relaxed; it has its own contractions, its own particles and its own obligations, and speaking it badly is more conspicuous than speaking politely badly.

What casual actually means

The word "casual" suggests a level of effort. In Japanese it is a statement about a relationship. Plain-form speech says that you and the listener are close, or that you outrank them, or that no distance needs to be maintained between you. It is used with friends, with family, with people clearly younger or junior, and with yourself.

That makes the switch into it a social event rather than a stylistic one. Two people who have been speaking politely and then move to plain form have agreed on something, and Japanese has a word for it, 打うち解とける, to relax the distance. The move is usually initiated by the senior or older party, and following it is safe while leading it is not. A learner who arrives at plain form first, unprompted, has claimed a closeness the other person may not have offered.

The safest working rule is the one you would use in any language with a formal register: mirror what you are given, and let the other person go first. What this lesson gives you is the ability to follow when they do, and the ability to understand everything said around you, which is the more urgent of the two, since almost nothing you overhear in Japan is in です and ます.

Dropping です, ます, だ and the particles

The first move is the one you already own. Put the final verb into the plain form and the sentence is casual.

今日きょう、何なにしてた？ kyou, nani shiteta? what did you do today?

Notice three things beyond the plain form. か is dropped from questions and replaced by rising intonation, which is why the written form takes a question mark, a punctuation mark Japanese borrowed for exactly this. だ is dropped after nouns and な adjectives far more often than です is: 「学生がくせい?」 「うん、学生がくせい。」 is an entire exchange, and adding だ to either would sound emphatic rather than complete. And ている loses its い, giving してた rather than していた, which belongs with the contractions below.

Then the particles go. In casual speech は, が and を are dropped whenever the sentence is short and the roles are obvious.

これ、食たべる？ kore, taberu? are you going to eat this?

コーヒー飲のむ？ koohii nomu? want a coffee?

に, で, から, まで and と are much more resistant, because they carry information that word order cannot recover. The rule of thumb is that the particles you can drop are the ones marking who does what to whom, which Japanese word order and context usually make obvious anyway, and the ones you cannot drop are the ones marking where, when, how and with whom.

The contractions

Casual speech shortens the long auxiliary chains this course has built. Every one of these is standard, none of them is sloppy, and you have met most of the full forms already.

The last two rows on the negative side deserve a note. なければならない, "must", is a long form and almost nobody says the whole of it in conversation. What you hear is 行いかなきゃ or 行いかなくちゃ, with the ならない simply left off, and the obligation carried by the fragment. This is the same trailing-off habit as the けど of the reasons lesson: Japanese is comfortable stopping before the end.

Example. Turn 明日あしたまでにレポートを出ださなければなりませんから、今日きょうは早はやく帰かえってしまいます into casual speech.

明日あしたまでにレポート出ださなきゃいけないから、今日きょう早はやく帰かえっちゃう. Working through it: を drops after レポート, since the role is obvious; なければなりません contracts to なきゃいけない, keeping just enough of the tail for から to attach to; から stays, because it carries the reason; は drops after 今日きょう; and てしまいます contracts to ちゃう. Counted in characters the sentence has gone from 37 to 30 and lost nothing except the register. Note that までに has not been touched, since dropping it would destroy the deadline.

Now you. Turn 傘かさを忘わすれてしまったので、買かっておかなければなりません into casual speech.

Sentence-final particles

Casual Japanese leans hard on the particles at the end of a sentence, and getting them wrong is the fastest way to sound blunt.

ね invites agreement and softens. いい天気てんきだね, "nice weather, isn't it". Use it when the listener already knows what you are telling them, or when you want the sentence to feel shared rather than asserted.

よ marks information the listener does not have. 明日あした、試験しけんだよ tells them something new. Because of that, よ on something they obviously know already sounds like a correction or a rebuke, and this is a common learner mistake: adding よ for emphasis, as English adds "you know", makes you sound as though you are informing people of the obvious.

よね combines the two: I believe this, and I think you agree. 明日あした、試験しけんだよね is checking a shared fact, and it is the softest way to raise something you are fairly sure of.

かな is I wonder, addressed half to yourself: 何なに食たべようかな. っけ asks for something you once knew and have lost: 名前なまえ、何なんだっけ, "what was your name again?". な on its own is a soft assertion or a musing, and leans masculine.

Example. Your friend has just come in and you can see it is raining. Choose between 雨あめだね and 雨あめだよ.

雨あめだね. Your friend has just walked through the rain and knows about it better than you do, so よ, which claims to be supplying news, would be absurd. ね marks the observation as shared and is what the situation calls for. Reverse it: if you are inside with no window and your friend has not been out, 雨あめだよ is right, because now you are the one with the information. The test is never emphasis; it is who knows.

Now you. You are checking a meeting time you are fairly sure of, and separately telling a colleague that the meeting has moved, which they do not yet know. Choose a particle for each.

Role language, and why fiction misleads

Textbooks and, far more, translated manga and anime present a sharply gendered casual Japanese: women ending sentences in わ and かしら and のよ, men in ぜ and ぞ and だぜ, elderly professors in じゃ. Learners absorb this and produce it, and it does not go well.

The linguist Satoshi Kinsui gave this phenomenon a name in a 2003 book: 役割語やくわりご, role language. His point is that these speech patterns are a set of conventions readers recognise instantly as marking a character type, and that they function in fiction precisely because they are not how people talk. A Japanese reader who meets わしは...じゃ knows an old man is speaking without being told, in the same way an English reader recognises stage cockney.

Real usage is much flatter. Surveys of young Japanese women find the heavily marked feminine forms in steep decline, and the actual gender difference in casual speech now shows up mainly in smaller things: women drop だ more, use ね more, and use the blunter sentence-enders less. The safe course for a learner is to use the unmarked set, ね, よ, よね, かな, っけ, and to leave ぜ, ぞ, わ and かしら to fiction, where they belong.

This is worth generalising. Almost every register error a learner makes comes from a source that was not speech: a textbook dialogue, a subtitle, a song. The remedy is to listen to unscripted Japanese, of which there is now an enormous amount available, and to notice how little of the marked material actually occurs.

Being a listener

The last piece is not about producing sentences at all. Japanese conversation places a heavy obligation on the listener to signal, constantly and out loud, that they are still there. These signals are 相槌あいづち, and English backchannelling is much lighter.

The usual set is small: うん and ええ for yes, そう and そうですか for acknowledgement, なるほど for "I see", へえ for mild surprise, そうなんだ for taking in something new. They go in the gaps, and there are more gaps than an English speaker expects, because Japanese speakers pause at phrase boundaries specifically to be answered.

Senko Maynard's comparisons of Japanese and American conversation in the 1980s found Japanese listeners producing backchannels roughly twice as often as their American counterparts in comparable stretches of talk. The practical effect is that a foreign learner who listens quietly and politely, as an English speaker would, is read as bored, unconvinced or not paying attention. Silence on the telephone is worse, since there is nothing else to go on, which is why Japanese telephone conversations are full of はい.

Getting this right costs almost nothing and improves how you are received out of all proportion to the effort. It is the single highest-value thing in this lesson.

Example. A colleague is telling you about a delayed train and a missed meeting. What do you say, and when?

Nothing more than うん or ええ at each pause, へえ or 大変たいへんだったね at the point where the story turns bad, and そうなんだ if a fact is new to you. What matters is the timing rather than the content: the gaps a Japanese speaker leaves after each phrase are invitations, and filling them is the listener's half of the conversation. Saving up a considered response for the end, which is polite behaviour in English, reads here as not having listened.

Now you. You are on the telephone and cannot nod. What changes?

Vocabulary

Where you have got to

Sixteen lessons ago you could form a polite sentence and stop. You can now put a clause inside another one, order events in time, give a reason and take it back, set a condition four different ways, report what somebody else said and grade how far you stand behind it, say who did whom a favour, say what you can do and what you have decided to do, take the actor out of a sentence and put a second one in, and move deliberately between three registers instead of one.

That is roughly the ground B1 covers, and more usefully it is the point at which the language stops being a set of patterns and starts being something you can use to find out what you do not know. The grammar ahead is real but thinner than what is behind you: the remaining constructions are mostly written and formal, and they can be picked up from reading. What is not thin is vocabulary, which from here on is the whole job, and the frequency arithmetic in the kanji lesson says how much of it there is.

The way forward is the way this lesson recommends for register: unscripted Japanese, in quantity, made for Japanese people rather than for learners. Everything in this course was designed to make that possible rather than to substitute for it.