The very last chapter in this textbook I have has a long detailed discussion of respect language and a complicated looking table.

I thought, I don't feel like doing this; I can just barely handle "normal" toned language. I'll skip this and save it for later.

So should I wait until I can read real Japanese material fairly well before I bother with studying respect language?

Or maybe I should just cursorily read about it so that hopefully I'll recognize it when I see it.

Does it come up very often in reading novels? What about books and newspapers?

What exactly do you mean by "respect language"?

That's the term my textbook uses. The table gives forms like these:

da = plain

de irassyaru = honorific

de gozaimasu = depreciatory/deferential

If you visit Japan, you might not necessarily need to use it but you do need to understand it, as shop keeps tend to use a mangled version of it. As far as coming up in novels, yes it comes up in novels and videos games. You will need to learn it, or at least the basics of it at some point. Keep in mind though, the intricate details of keigo tend to one of the aspects of the language that seems to confuse native speakers. So in summation, do you need to understand respect langauge? Yes. Do you need to know it the point where you you know that "お疲れ様です" is used for people of equal and lower level, while "お疲れの出ませんのように" is use towards people of higher level? No.

RandomQuotes Wrote:If you visit Japan, you might not necessarily need to use it but you do need to understand it, as shop keeps tend to use a mangled version of it. As far as coming up in novels, yes it comes up in novels and videos games. You will need to learn it, or at least the basics of it at some point. Keep in mind though, the intricate details of keigo tend to one of the aspects of the language that seems to confuse native speakers. So in summation, do you need to understand respect langauge? Yes. Do you need to know it the point where you you know that "お疲れ様です" is used for people of equal and lower level, while "お疲れの出ませんのように" is use towards people of higher level? No.

Thanks for the insights. I guess it's another complicating factor of Japanese (like kanji).

I think you should learn it when you find a need for it. You don't have to know 100% of everything about Japan. What's your main goal in studying? Why did you chose Japanese? If you want to be a secretary for a Japanese company then yes, learn this now and get familiar with it. If you want to be able to understand your favorite jpop songs, then you probably can get away with bluffing this for the rest of your life.

Personally, I want to be able to play video games in their native language and understand raw anime/manga. That's a mixed basket and sometimes there'll be a lot of formal language in a historic series or something, but overall, I haven't had to know this yet. I've been in Japan for the past 2 months and while I've heard some "gozaimasu," context and surrounding vocab has been more than enough so I always know what to do without having to understand the intricacies of the verb conjugation.

In short... I'm still kind of waiting for a reason to learn this myself. I learned informal language, like rude language that no one ever really uses in Japan, right away because of the aforementioned manga/anime. But the formal language that "real' Japanese people use has proved less practical for me.

In U.S college Japanese classes, it seems like most Japanese departments wait until the intermediate level (3rd-year level classes or so) to teach keigo ("respect language"), so if you have no immediate plans on going to Japan (where the shop keepers use it non-stop), then it might be fine to wait.
There is some use of keigo in novels, but from the ones I've read, that's mostly if they take place in an office, or the main character goes to work or something. Also, if it's a fantasy novel or something, and the character is addressing royalty or nobles, they'll use a mix of keigo & older sounding Japanese. (like the mock-Shakespearean English some fantasy books in English use)

Overall it wouldn't hurt to glance at it, but I think most people only learn keigo after they have mastered desu/masu & plain form. I only actually studied it when I was intermediate level, as part of studying for JLPT N2, but I had come across it many times before by then, which helped.