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 wasn't really about respect. It was grammar - and nobody was teaching it that way.

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, in actual effect keigo is only partially about showing respect. It is mainly about speaking correctly in context, and if so it starts looking a lot like grammar.

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.

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.

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 linguistics jargon (Teichōgo etc) and put keigo more in real life contexts
• Treat keigo as grammar, and treat mistakes as grammatical, not cultural
• 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. It's grammar. And grammar 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!