Not even natives speak keigo naturally without training, which is why companies usually have booklets and stuff to teach their employees proper keigo. As long as you can speak in teineigo fluently and KNOW keigo, I think that's good enough to be hired unless it's a job which specifically demands that you speak keigo fluently on a daily basis.

So, the OP was talking about having trouble with desu/masu style, which isn't what I would call 'keigo', it's just standard 'polite', which makes me wonder if some of this conversation isn't a bit at cross-purposes. I don't think anybody's claiming that native Japanese speakers need to be taught desu-masu, for instance :-)

One other reason I don't think exposure works very well for keigo is that keigo often depends on very specific phrases used in very specific situations.  For instance, if you want to ask a professor to borrow a book, exposure won't necessarily help unless it was exposure to that exact situation (a student asking a professor to borrow a book).  Even then, because native speakers don't always use keigo correctly, you can't depend on that exposure as much as you can with other aspects of the language.

JSL 3 has a form for asking this: 先生のご本をちょっと拝借させていただけないでしょうか。  There are a lot of things you have to do here, and a lot of decisions to make -- using ご in front of 本, adding ちょっと to soften the request, using the humble 拝借, using the causative + verb of receiving form, making いただく potential, using plain form instead of -masu in front of でしょうか, and using the でしょうか at the end.  You also have to make the basic decision of whether, culturally, it's even appropriate to ask the teacher to borrow the book at all.  When people are claiming you can learn keigo in a week I imagine they're just talking about learning to conjugate a verb as お+verb stem+になる or お+verb stem+する, but there's a lot more to it than that.

Now, I do think that some amount of exposure and listening is helpful, but in this area more so than in others, you have to gain a lot of basic knowledge to make sense of what you're being exposed to.

yudantaiteki wrote:

JSL 3 has a form for asking this: 先生のご本をちょっと拝借させていただけないでしょうか。  There are a lot of things you have to do here, and a lot of decisions to make -- using ご in front of 本, adding ちょっと to soften the request, using the humble 拝借, using the causative + verb of receiving form, making いただく potential, using plain form instead of -masu in front of でしょうか, and using the でしょうか at the end.  You also have to make the basic decision of whether, culturally, it's even appropriate to ask the teacher to borrow the book at all.  When people are claiming you can learn keigo in a week I imagine they're just talking about learning to conjugate a verb as お+verb stem+になる or お+verb stem+する, but there's a lot more to it than that.

You're making this sound a lot more complex than it is--most of the difficulties in the sentence have nothing to do with keigo.

"いただけないでしょうか？" is a very very common pattern, and is really no different than "もらえませんか？"  You don't choose whether or not to make いただく or もらう the potential, they NEED to be the potential.  Sentences using the て form followed by these verbs always mean "I get someone to..."  So you can't say something like 手伝ってもらいますか？　or 手伝ってもらいませんか？ because those sentences mean "Will I get you to help?" and "Won't I get you to help?", which doesn't make sense.　 In the same way, without the potential this sentences would mean "Won't I get you to lend me the book?", which sounds equally as weird and wrong.  It needs to be potential so it means "Would it be possible for me to get you to lend me this book?"  The only part of this that is keigo is choosing the word いただく over もらう, and using でしょう.  Using the negative form is more polite even when not speaking particularly polite Japanese, so it's not really keigo.  All these things are taught in relatively basic college Japanese classes.

It's quite hard to get used to using the causative with a request form, but as this is done even among friends, it's not an aspect of keigo.

Choosing the humble verb for 'to borrow' is a little difficult in that it's not one of the more common keigo expressions, and I personally have never heard 本 said as ご本.  I think these are the hardest part of this sentence in terms of the polite language--but the complexity does not go beyond knowing the humble equivalent of the verb for borrowing, and knowing whether 本　takes an　お or a ご when used in a politer form.  This doesn't seem any more complex than knowing that 致す is the humble version of する, which doesn't seem very complex to me at all.

Last edited by Tzadeck (2010 February 27, 10:58 pm)

mezbup wrote:

Isn't it just ご for 漢語 and お for 和語?

No, that's a rule of thumb, not an absolute rule.  Otherwise these words would be wrong:

お電話
お散歩
お財布
お茶
お給料
お礼
お世辞
お正月

I can't come up with any 大和言葉 right now that use ご for honorific, but I've little doubt that there are some out there.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2010 February 28, 9:05 pm)

mezbup wrote:

Isn't it just ご for 漢語 and お for 和語?

I'm sure I remember my Japanese teacher saying that if the word has a っ、ゃ、ょ or ゅ
[小さい]　in it then it's ご, otherwise it's お.  Although that wouldn't work for お給料 then, would it...?!

pm215 wrote:

JimmySeal wrote:

I can't come up with any 大和言葉 right now that use ご for honorific, but I've little doubt that there are some out there.

How about ごゆっくり, or is that a cunningly disguised 漢語 ?

Yep, looks like you found one.

tokidokibenkyoushimasu wrote:

I'm sure I remember my Japanese teacher saying that if the word has a っ、ゃ、ょ or ゅ[小さい]　in it then it's ご, otherwise it's お.

Sounds like your teacher was just oversimplifying the 漢語/non-漢語 distinction, producing a compounded rule of thumb.  There are plenty of words that don't fit this guideline either.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2010 February 28, 11:18 am)

from what I've heard many Japanese employees have to be trained in keigo when they join a company from school or university, I'd guess you'd get the same treatment.