How to Shorten Your Japanese
08. Apr, 2009
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Deas lives on and blogs from Hakatajima, halfway between Honshu and Shikoku. He’s a fellow wonky culture lover who tends to write about his personal struggle to conquer the Japanese language, as well as about trips abroad, adventures in eating, life as an ALT, and comedy. From tongue twisters, to old radio dramas and just being silly, he approaches Japan from a casual perspective, tempered by time and humor.
In this guest post, I thought I’d walk you through some convenient methods for picking the pace up on your speech, dropping unnecessary syllables, and blending in with the kids your age. (Unless you’re older and you want to be like the uncomfortable teen’s awkward mom poorly using “Wassup?” If that’s you, this article might not be for you. Then again, some people can pull it off. Your call.) The following examples are all found in the above video as well. Choose your favorite format, and follow along. And of course, feel free to leave comments and ask questions!
The Incredible Shrinking Greeting
Many greetings become condensed, maybe because they are often repeated a bazillion times every day as set phrases. Here are 3 examples, and one head-fake to watch out for.
おはようございます → ～っざいます (like a sneeze, but not)
こんにちは → ちわっ
こんにちは → チーッス
*「おっす」 is NOT an abbreviation of おはようございます, it is a different word entirely. Really. Promise.
High Ranking Thanking
Thanking people is also a pretty common affair. When one starts vigorously thanking people, it becomes easy to trip on all of those syllables. How do we fix that problem? Simple – remove most of the syllables.
ありがとうございます → あざっす
Bust a Copula
First off, no “copula” isn’t a dirty word. Ahem. (Nor is it a Hollywood director – that’s Coppola. Sheesh.) “Copula” refers to the word that means “it is” in Japanese; です, or in casual form だ. While you can’t make だ any shorter, you can sure make です easier to say by slicing off that hard “d” sound. Sure, it’s kind of like erasing half of the word – but all the cool kids do it.
です → ッス
*Explanation of the “oyaji gag” from the video: 「そうッス」＝(kinda)＝「ソース」＝「SAUCE」As you can see, it’s a really dumb pun. You will get groans with this joke. If that’s your goal, feel free to use it – but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Zingier I-Adjectives
When you want to be super emphatic, or show surprise, you can shorten an i-adjective by dropping the い on the end and abruptly ending the sound just before it. You don’t usually say this for positive things, but there are exceptions. (I can imagine choking off the end of すごい or its altered form スゲェ, or perhaps 深い when someone says something profound, but it’s not too common.)
暑い → 暑っ
寒い → 寒っ
早い → 早っ
Accentuate with Accent
Tired of speaking like the textbook all the time? Want to loosen up? Introduce a little bit of slang to your speech to give it the right amount of local grit. It helps when you’ve been in Japan, and can discern between “ya’ll” and “youse guys” type accents, of course. If you can switch appropriately to mirror the people around you, you’ll have become a truly adept social chameleon.
わかりません → わかんない
わかりません → わからん
知りません → 知らん
By the way, I used kanji in the video where I’ve used kanji here. 分かりません is iffy, so I left it in hiragana.
Message From Koichi: Be sure to read and follow Deas’ blog, his YouTube account, and Twitter account!
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Oh, and your “uh”s, “um”s, and the “ah”s at the sounds like a song XD.
Wow – I just noticed which Harvey this was! Wow. Big praise coming from you. Thanks, man! (I totally get reprimanded for it too…except when I'm told it's かっこえぇ, ha ha.)
I kinda thought it sounded like a lightsaber fight, myself. Ha ha ha. :-D
Nice guide.
Regarding おっす, one of our student teachers, who studied in Japan taught us that it is an abbreviated form of おはようございます, but only between males. He would know because he greeted a girl with it and got humiliated.
Whoa! This Deas is also awesome! The video was funny and good. If I ever make a video, I'm absolutely going to start it with a disclaimer in Japanese saying that I'm not Koichi from Tofugu. Haha. Give me a topic to speak about, and I'll make you something someday if you want.
I liked what he said, but I also think it's pretty important to say that for foreign people, speaking too informally can make a person seem rude or intimidating. I think that for a foreign person, it's always better to veer towards “too polite” than towards “too informal”. That goes X2 for people who live in Tokyo or somewhere where people are more sensitive, and X4 for people who are big and not Asian and already seem slightly more intimidating.
Hi Julie – thanks for the compliments. If you knew me, and frequently heard me speak in Japanese, you wouldn't be worried too much about my position on politeness. Ha ha. I promise. I learned Japanese in Tokyo, and my teachers were always super polite. Having said that, I tend to have the opposite problem. My host family first alerted me to it, actually. Because I was constantly concerned with not sounding rude, I always spoke in ます form. They said that when you're getting to know someone its fine, but when the relationship has grown (and it's not a relationship that necessitates habitual 敬語, 尊敬語, 謙譲語, etc.), that politeness begins to give way to coldness. Unfriendliness. Distance.
While this article was meant solely to have fun with some shortened forms of Japanese, it's not meant as a pattern to model your speaking after. I actually don't use most of forms I taught in the clip – only a few, sprinkled in with the rest of my speech. It's still important to learn them for listening comprehension, though. Even though I don't use them, I guarantee that I hear (or overhear) each one of the forms I taught every single day from someone. Taken in that light, I think it's valuable.
So, in short, I agree – being polite is admirable. Don't be rude or flippant. But learn when you need to adjust your speech to keep a relationship “right.” Veer towards politeness, but don't be scared of casual speech. Just learn to use it in the best way possible. :-)
konnichiwa^^
uhmmm,,can u pLs transLate aLL of the characters in romaji translations,..coz I don't know how to read japanese characters…but,,tnx for upLoading dis kind of heLpfuL tutoriaL…
….P.S.: sorry for the wrong grammar…'coz I'm not that good english^^
konnichiwa^^
uhmmm,,can u pLs transLate aLL of the characters in romaji translations,..coz I don't know how to read japanese characters…but,,tnx for upLoading dis kind of heLpfuL tutoriaL…
….P.S.: sorry for the wrong grammar…'coz I'm not that good english^^
So I saw this video (nice one btw) and I started thinking of some other shortened expressions or ways to say things, and I'm not quite sure, but I was wondering if there exists some easier way to say that “I have to do something..”
for example: V+なければなりません V+なければいけません V+なくてはいけません
I'm not sure what ways you can shorten those, but I think it would be nice in normal conversation (x_x) I heard my friend use なきゃだめだった is this correct, or is it a completely different word entirely? Thanks for the help :P
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This is awesome :) but, im still confused on the shortening of ohayo gozaimasu. is “っざいます” correct?
Im guessing ur currently in Hakama( i can tell cause im learning different dialects even though im not supposed to at my status). So, this way of saying the -iru form is considered slang in standard dialect?
you should ask them how to spell it.
wow thats cool i never knew they actually shortened the words i just thought they had some super human way of talking really fast :) also i heard some of my japanese friends just saying the end of a sentence after sombody else has said the same thing (eg. saying ます～ straight after someone said ありがとうございます) does this count as proper slang or were they just being lazy lol. oh yeah and cant you just use おはよう instead of the whole thing?
Awesome, I didn't know most of these even though I've been reading about Japanese slang, haha.
Btw, ス and ッス are /both/ shortened versions of です, aren't they?
Awesome, I didn't know most of these even though I've been reading about Japanese slang, haha.
Btw, ス and ッス are /both/ shortened versions of です, aren't they?
です and だ are contractions of でございます and である respectively, so really, people are contracting contractions.
です and だ are contractions of でございます and である respectively, so really, people are contracting contractions.