About Colloquial (or Informal/Spoken) Japanese

1. Unlike English, Japanese employs different 'speech styles', depending on who you're talking to or who you're talking about, and all verbs in Japanese have two different 'forms':

We start with the Informal Speech Style.

Informal style can be used when you talk with your family member(s) or close friend(s).
Do NOT use the informal speech style when you're talking to someone superior to you or older than you. Sometimes, this offends people!

2. All the verb forms listed in the Voc. List are Direct Forms.
The following gives you a taste of what Polite Forms of these verbs look like:

As seen above, all the Polite Forms of Verbs end with /-masu/. We often call the Polite Forms of Verbs "V-masu Forms". We will learn later how to change direct forms of verbs into polite ones.

3. Japanese has several expressions for 'YES' and 'NO'. Which 'YES'/'NO' expression you use depends upon your speech style.

In this chapter, we practice only /Un/ (informal 'yes')!

4. Japanese 'YES' and 'NO' are different from English 'yes' and 'no' in the following fashion:

This difference becomes important when you are asked by negative questions. We will come back to this difference when we introduce Negative Forms.

5. In colloquial Japanese, you hear often /yo/ at the end of a sentence.
This so-called "sentence particle" corresponds (roughly) to the English, "I'm telling you."
Use this sentence particle /yo/ when you provide your friend with new information.
For instance, suppose that your friend does not know whether Chris plays tennis or not. And, she or he asks you:
"Chris tenisu suru?" (Does Chris play tennis?)

In this context, Response 1 (as compared to Response 2) sounds much better!

  1. Un, suru yo.
  2. Un, suru.
Now, you can do Voc. Situational Drill 2, can't you?
Next Grammar Point!