So much casual

Bunpro
#1

This has been bothering me for a while now, but more often than not, verb conjugations seem to require casual.
I feel, as an N4 learner, that if I’m talking to someone with that level of Japanese, I’ll probably not be close enough to them for casual speech. While it is obviously important to learn these points, there just seems to be an overwhelming disparity between required casual and required polite.

Ultimately, it’d be great to supply either casual or polite, depending on what you’re preferences are, but maybe I’m just asking too much.

It’s also entirely possible that there’s equal amounts of casual and polite, but since I’m biased to one side the other seems more prevalent.

Thoughts?

#2

I think part of the confusion is treating “plain form” as synonymous with “casual speech.” Japanese conjugations aren’t inherently polite or casual in quite that way. Plain forms are required by lots of grammar patterns even inside otherwise polite sentences.

So learning plain-form conjugations at N4 doesn’t mean you’re expected to speak casually to strangers. You still need them to construct perfectly polite Japanese; です／ます politeness is often expressed at the end of the sentence rather than on every verb within it.

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#3

Speaking is one aspect of learning Japanese, but so is reading and listening. You will encounter plain form many many times as you read and watch more Japanese content. If you only ever focus on ます you’ll end up having a harder time with comprehension.

For example in Japanese music I hear the occasional ます but plain form is far more common.

And to second what @DuckDave said, I don’t think you’re going to have trouble remembering to use ます or です in conversation. Context switching becomes quite natural the more conversations you have.

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#4

another thing is that plain form is often used even in polite speech

I remember being very confused why someone said いないです rather than いません but it’s not casual or impolite

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#5

Thirding (Fourth-ing?) the fact that plain form gets used even in polite speech.

In a lot of longer sentences, the content in the middle is going to be plain form and the actual “politeness” です・ます won’t come up until the end of the sentence (assuming you aren’t using keigo or anything that results in literally different word choice).

Like, for example, if I want to talk about “the person reading a book,” that’ll be something like 「本を読んでいる人。」But if my sentence is longer, like “Oh, the person reading a book over there might be someone I know,” suddenly that’s gonna be in the middle of the sentence, along the lines of 「あら、あそこで本を読んでいる人は知り合いかもしれません。」

You still have the long ます for かもしれません on there for politeness (although tbh if I’m talking to one of my coworkers I would absolutely just be using かも here) but you need to keep/know the plain form 読んでいる in the middle.

And honestly, when I first studied abroad here in college I actually had a bit of a hard time because soooooo much of what we’d done in class had been purely です・ます form, and suddenly the students around me were using plain form way more than I was used to.

I think there’s also a slight habit, among Japanese learners, of being So Aware That Formality Is A Thing that it can be surprising how quickly and…well, casually casual Japanese gets used. I’m sure it’s impacted by a lot of the folks I interact with being fully aware that I’m not fluent, but I don’t stress too much about です・ます with coworkers and it’s never really cropped up as an issue for anything.

And finally like @cafelatte said, there’s also plenty of in-between levels. You’ll hear people use plain form conjugation and tack on か, and it’s not formal but it’s not casual or rude either.

TLDR: Plain form gets used a lot more than you’d think for both grammar and casual-speech purposes, so imo I think it’s important to practice. (But a setting to swap between depending on which one you need more practice for could be useful!)

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