Struggling with keigo

So today we finally (to my dismay) went back to a chapter we’d skipped: keigo. I will confess that, having not slept very well, I was not in the best mood for studying a fairly tiresome aspect of Japanese. On the plus side, GenkiJACS do sensibly leave it until you've studied absolutely everything else in the textbook, since everything else is much more genuinely useful for most people.

Keigo is basically a set of formal, polite language used for various situations where you want to show additional respect or to seem humble. In English and similar languages we tend to control politeness through the choice of words, hedging words like “possibly” and “would”, and by using avoiding allocating responsibility for problems to the person we’re talking to. Instead of “will you finish making the tea by six?” we might say “I was wondering if you happen to know yet whether the tea is likely to be ready by six?” Often we also tag on ‘explanations’ to excuse what might seem like rudeness: “…only I was thinking of nipping to the shops if there’s time”, or something like that.

In Japanese, I’m sure that sort of thing happens too, but they also have special vocabulary that replaces a lot of common words. There are entirely new verbs used in place of the most common ones, and other verbs are put into the passive to show politeness – they don’t actually become grammatically passive, but you use that form of the verb. Prefixes get added to many nouns, making them “politer” through some magical process.

Obviously, it isn’t my language to gripe about, but I have to confess that (as you might have guessed) I basically find keigo annoying.

For one thing, as a learner, keigo adds a significant burden to learning the language, without offering any very tangible benefit. Keigo gets used quite a lot in things like the service industry (shopping, restaurants), and by junior staff or pupils, as well as cropping up in formal kinds of media. All of those are common situations for language learners to discuss or encounter in real life, whereas the everyday situations where normal language is used tend to require actual friendship. It’s quite important to learn keigo, at least enough to pick out the key bits and filter the information you need from the sentence. However, what learning keigo bestows is the ability to speak in ritually polite and formal ways – which are only necessary because keigo exists. I already know perfectly adequate words and phrases for doing all those things; I don't want to waste valuable brain on learning slightly different ways to say them to different people.

And the existence of keigo makes it that much more difficult to read, listen to or watch things in Japanese by essentially replacing some language you've already learned with an equivalent that you don't yet know. It's one thing if you're swapping, say, "rake" and "libertine", or "undulate" with "oscillate", because both are fairly uncommon; it's quite another thing to switch "be", "come", "do," "go", "eat", "drink", and other vital everyday terms with entirely different ones that mean exactly the same thing. Keigo can also be quite confusing, because ambiguity is politer, but this sometimes makes it more difficult to work out what is actually happening: one common practice replaces the verb for "be" with "become", for example. It's not inherently wrong or anything, but it's another arbitrary thing that you need to learn.

Another thing is that the very formal levels of politeness in Japanese reinforce some social ideas that I find very uncomfortable. I’m fairly competent in using politeness in English when called for, but I have a very egalitarian philosophy and don’t tend to vary my language much for people’s social status. The Japanese idea that you owe particular respect to older pupils, or to people who’ve worked in a company longer than you, or that your boss is an elevated and worthier person rather than someone who does a different job as part of the same system and incidentally gets paid a lot more, are ones I instinctively revolt against. I want to respect other people’s languages and cultures, but at the same time, I don’t feel comfortable adopting these ways of talking or thinking.

The third issue is that keigo seems to be increasingly an entirely artificial thing, a lumbering zombie hulk kept in hideous unlife by demands from the ever-influential They. Native speakers notoriously don’t really understand keigo, so that even those who pride themselves on mastery of the language complain of their mistakes. Companies send their employees on special courses in using keigo so that they’ll be able to use these speech patterns with customers and colleagues. Shops have keigo manuals to instil the correct language in their peons (and purists leap all over their supposed mistakes). There are complaints that young people simply aren’t used to speaking this kind of Japanese, and no longer understand how to use it. In fairness, there have always been complaints that Young People Can't Speak Our Language Properly; I imagine the early Proto-Indo-Europeans were revolted that Today's Youth couldn't pronounce [gʷʰ] properly and kept dropping word-final *s without applying compensatory vowel lengthening.

My approach to language is one of affection for weird features, but I also agree that actual usage is king. Keigo no longer seems to be any natural part of Japanese. It is an artificial relic of feudal times, one that must be painstakingly learned by native speakers as a bolt-on to their actual language, when their normal language is (like all languages) entirely adequate for their needs. You can tell, because if they actually needed what keigo provides, it would still be part of ordinary Japanese. That’s how language works. If young people are unable to use keigo, it's probably because keigo is not useful to them.

However, because keigo does exist, it creates implications. A quick glance around the internet (even in English) will throw up people complaining of feeling slighted that a shop assistant spoke to them in normal Japanese – even though this was almost certainly the polite –masu form with polite vocabulary, rather than the simple colloquial way they would speak to friends. People who can’t really do keigo are judged for it, in the same way as those who have a provincial accent on the BBC or otherwise use dialect features that are entirely correct but non-standard; I am pretty sure that, like most such situations, it will reinforce class divisions.

In summary: it is a source of needless complexity and redundancy, it reinforces ancient ideas of social precedence that ought to be revised in view of more modern ideas about human equality, and it is so unnatural to modern speakers that it has to be specially taught and is frequently wrong. It doesn’t appear to bring any benefits other than slight nuance, but not using it or using it wrong incites judgement. Here’s to its imminent extinction.

Unfortunately, I do have to learn this stuff, not least in order to pass the end-of-book test that will let me proceed to another class (at least, I have to reason to think this chapter alone is excluded). Equally unfortunately, I find it very difficult to motivate myself to learn it, because it feels like such a waste of time. I can only hope that I'll be seized with a sudden burst of enthusiasm.