Respectful Language

The first step to figuring out what respectful language actually means is being able to spot it in the wild. That doesn’t mean memorising every single respectful form in a huge list (please don’t do that to yourself). Learning a core set by heart is definitely helpful, but a lot of the rest can be picked up from exposure in real-life situations.

A much more practical approach is to watch how different parts of speech – nouns, verbs, and so on – get turned into honorifics. If you train yourself to notice those patterns, then when some mysterious new respectful word appears, you can still think:

From there, you can usually take a good, educated guess at its meaning. You don’t need to have seen that exact word before to understand the role it’s playing.

P⁻¹, P⁰, P⁺¹: Our Little Politeness Meter

In this course, we’ll use a simple three–step scale to tag how polite something is:

• P⁻¹ – plain speech, no honorific flavour
• P⁰ – polite language (your standard です・ます type politeness)
• P⁺¹ – language that includes respectful honorifics (with or without polite language)

Whenever you see a referent honorific form (respectful and/or humble), or a sentence that uses it, it’ll be marked with P⁺¹, our “highest” level on this scale.

This system is just a tool, not a perfect mirror of real-life Japanese. One of its big limitations is that it doesn’t show differences inside each Politeness Level:

• some P⁺¹ respectful forms are more respectful than others

Just as

• some P⁰ polite forms are more polite than others
• some P⁻¹ plain forms are more plain than others

Instead of piling on more numbers and coming up with something like P⁺¹·⁵ or P⁺² (please, no), we’ll introduce those nuances as we go, alongside each form.

In other words, you can use P⁻¹ / P⁰ / P⁺¹ as a rough map to where you are in politeness-land, and the detailed

shades will be explained when introducing new patterns themselves.