Hi,

i apologize in advance if it's not the appropriate category for this but i would like to ask a question to japanese natives or advanced speakers about a mail that i wrote, concerning the sending of a certificate. by the reaction of the people who received the mail, it seems the japanese i used did not sound so natural, and couldn't have pass for the way a native speaker would speak. I made some typing mistakes but i wonder if there was something else.

お返事ありがとうごます。
残ながら今のところ認定証はスキャンできません。
他に方法はありませんか？
***というハンドルネームを使って***にログインできればありがたいです。
何か問題があれば****という女流棋士の友人と連絡を取ってみます。
よろしくお願いします。

I have replaced the names by ***.

I will be very glad if you give me a honest answer. Thank you in advance.

"ありがとうごます"

I dunno about the rest, but I think you'd definitely wanna fix that :p

i didn't even saw that...:/
was kind of tired when i wrote it:p

Also 残 should presumably be 残念 and you shouldn't have です　after ありがたい, but mostly it seems pretty good. I don't think it reads like native writing though. The sentences feel a little disjointed and there's some odd phrasing, but writing like a native is well beyond my level so I can't really help you with that.

Edit: Seems I might be wrong about ありがたい　＋　です. I need to google some more. ^^

mmm i didn't noticed this typing mistake too ...maybe this mistakes have been interpreted for genuine ones...

.

Are you sure about お忙しい中? I've seen ご多忙中 or お忙しい所を, but not お忙しい中.

.

In day to day emails and notices at work I see お忙しいところ more than お忙しい中 but they are both used in my small part of Japan

Arupan Wrote:Yeah, I'm sure. You read it as なか and not ちゅう right?

Either way it's not something I'm familiar with -- not a big surprise since I don't have lots of experience with formal e-mails. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't a mistake on your part.

i have one question about keigo, it is really "compulsory" to use it in a kind of official or "for asking a favor" mail? or it can't be okay to use only normal polite forms? i don't know very much of keigo...:p

Ceras Wrote:mm i have one question about keigo, it is really "compulsory" to use it in a kind of official or "for asking a favor" mail? or it can't be okay to use only normal polite forms? i don't know very much of keigo...:p

If you want to sound like a native speaker, yes it is compulsory. Letters or e-mails requesting favors, especially from people you don't know or superiors/teachers, tend to use the maximum possible keigo you can. They tend to use a lot of forms that you never use in speech or see that much outside of this　(like ～していただければありがたく存じます instead of てください). If the favor is very small or the person isn't someone you are going to ever meet or know in real life you can bend the rules a bit, but even there basic keigo would be expected. You haven't made it entirely clear who you're contacting and what the favor is, so I can't be more specific.

If you don't know keigo then you'll either have to learn it or just accept that your mail won't sound like a native speaker.

mm i thought it was okay for a normal polite answer because himself he responded me apparently not using extremely polite forms, such at てください, but now that i think about this, it seems very logical that the asker has to be more polite than the answerer in this kind of situations...

actually to say the facts, i was writing this for asking for a favor on a game server (game of go) which would normally be not possible, because normally reserved to professionnal go players (but i wanted to ask for it to see if there was exceptions). i got a response from a japanese administrator of the site asking me to join a copy of a professionnal go player certification, which (not being a pro player) i couldn't provide...so basically i tried something to see if there was no over ways...:p

my interlocutor responded me in japanese, not considering i could not have been a native speaker at first.But Anyway after i sended this mail, his response implied that the japanese in the mail was not one of a native... so that was the reason why i asked about the content of my mail...

(sorry about the double post)