Japanese Language | Culture
Why Is Politeness in the Japanese Language a Hard Concept to Grasp?
The desu/masu form is often translated into English as formal or polite Japanese — but does that fully capture its meaning?
Published in
7 min readSep 30, 2022
Social media has changed the face of language learning.
Today, language teaching influencers can reach a massive audience with just one post. A traditional teacher could never imagine the same number of students in an entire career.
Unfortunately, as educational content has moved online and our attention spans have gotten shorter, much of this content tends to over-simplify things — especially on Instagram.
Informal vs formal Japanese?
Just a few days ago, I saw a bite-sized Japanese language educational post appear on my Instagram feed that explained formal and informal verb conjugations in Japanese:
Verb: “Is”
- Formal present:です (desu)
- Formal past: でした (deshita)
- Informal present: だ (da)
- Informal past: だった (datta)
