Why keigoisgrammar?

I mean they both mean "do" so why can't we get on with just shimasu? I know because I was there - before I arrived in Japan I already achieved an N1, but always left keigo as something I could do later.

Once I arrived in Japan in 2012 though, I realized really how small the pie of plain desu-masu occupied. People will definitely understand you, but the majority of social situations in Japan (especially if you are working, even at baito) are scenarios that require more formality than desu-masu offers - or less. Desu-masu was basically the cop-out if you couldn't get your keigo right.

And so I picked up my first keigo guidebook. Which was certainly comprehensive, but something seemed just a bit off about how keigo was being taught, both in the books and online.

It took me a while to put my finger on what. Keigo was being taught as a question of respect, when almost everything I actually had to learn behaved like grammar - a system with rules, patterns, and answers that are simply wrong.

Keigoisgrammar was made because of my disagreements about how keigo was being taught.

Keigo is about "respect" - but is it really?

Your typical keigo textbook starts by talking about how you "lower" yourself to "heighten" the other person - and many learners take that literally to mean that your keigo is a sign of respecting the others and start thinking about who they need to respect and not.

But keigo can be very rude as well. Just see Japanese parliamentarians use keigo on each other and you will see how keigo can be used in a very paggro, sarcastic and downright disrespectful way. But they never drop to desu-masu or the plain da form in doing so.

Why? Because despite what the textbooks say, keigo is only partially about showing respect. It is mainly about speaking correctly in context.

And by moving the frame from what is "respectful" and "disrespectful" to what is "correct" and "wrong", keigo starts looking more and more like grammar. And it wasn't being taught that way.

Hidden grammatical cues in keigo

Japanese often drops the subject. But what many keigo books do not mention explicitly is that keigo conveys implicitly who the subject is. The example above reads "The book that (someone) read was interesting" - the お〜になった form is a Sonkeigo form - which means that (someone) will never be the first person, or someone on the speaker's "side". (See uchi and soto in the cheatsheet page.)

What this means is that keigo conveys a lot of information about who is doing what. For language nerds, this is analogous to how languages such as Spanish can drop their subjects (I / You / We / They) because the verb itself contains enough information to tell who is doing it already.

Linguists will also note this is the flip-side of subject-verb agreement, which keigo also requires in its own way.

But desu-masu alone will not do this. Which is why many Japanese learners, even advanced learners, who are not used to keigo look at the above sentence and are lost as they can't see the smoking gun in the who-dun-it.

Keigo is taught too late in the curriculum

Because keigo is a difficult subject and requires a lot of base constructions, it is often put as advanced curriculum. This is very justifiable as you would need to know how to do verb conjugations first.

I personally think that it comes too late though. Because of how much it appears in Japanese daily life, and the inability to properly use it could block someone from getting a baito or otherwise, I think there needs to be a tool for middle intermediates and above to be able to start learning it.

Side note: You can be more respectful and be more wrong

お読みになられる is not rude. It is more deferential than the correct form - and it is still an error (二重敬語, honorific applied twice). Politeness went up; correctness went down.

The mistakes a learner actually gets corrected on are very often this kind: broken rules rather than bad manners. Those are exactly the mistakes that practice fixes.

A linguist would file honorific language under pragmatics - how language is used socially - and they would be right to. 部長、週末どうだった？ isn't an ungrammatical sentence, it's a socially wrong one, and no rule book will ever fully replace a feel for the room.

So this site isn't a claim about where keigo belongs on the map of linguistics. It's a claim about what works when you sit down to learn it. The parts that trip people up day to day are rule-shaped, and rules can be drilled until the right form arrives before you have finished thinking about it. Trying instead to reason your way to the correct level of deference, live, in the two seconds you have before answering the phone, is what leaves people stuck mid-sentence for years. I was one of them.

This tool aims to do a few things.

• Do quick fire drills, because that's the kind of snap reaction you need to develop for keigo
• Do less of the socio-linguistics jargon (Teichōgo etc) and put keigo more in real life contexts
• Treat keigo as a rule system you can practise - and be clear about when a mistake is a broken rule and when it is a judgement call
• Cheatsheet for those who want to get the fundamentals first
• Also addresses some modern-day trends - keigo on Slack is not the same as in email

Because keigo isn't respect with extra steps. Treat it like grammar, and it becomes something you can drill.

If you're where I was in 2012, I hope this saves you some of the years I spent going the long way around.

If this tool is of help to you please do consider contributing through ko-fi below! Please contact me at info@austin-zeng.com if you see anything that is off.