How Japanese politeness works, without memorising keigo

Japanese politeness runs on three settings, and only one of them is about the person you are talking to. です／ます decides how formally you address your listener; 尊敬語 and 謙譲語 decide whose actions you raise and whose you lower. Once you can tell which of the three a sentence is doing, most of keigo stops being a vocabulary to memorise and becomes a transformation you apply to a sentence you can already build.

That is the part a textbook chapter tends to bury under a table of irregular verbs, which is why keigo has a reputation for being a second language bolted onto the first.

The three levels answer two different questions

丁寧語 (teineigo) is addressee politeness: です and ます. It is aimed at whoever you are speaking to, and it says nothing about the people in the sentence. At N5, the split between です, だ and a predicate with neither begins with the word class at the end of the sentence.

尊敬語 (sonkeigo) raises the person doing the action. 謙譲語 (kenjōgo) lowers you, or anyone on your side, relative to the person your action touches.

The reason those get tangled is that they answer different questions. Teineigo is about who you are talking to. Sonkeigo and kenjōgo are about who you are talking about. They are two dials, not one slider, and you can turn them independently:

• 先生が来る — casual to your listener, neutral about the teacher.
• 先生が来ます — polite to your listener, still neutral about the teacher.
• 先生がいらっしゃる — casual to your listener, respectful about the teacher.
• 先生がいらっしゃいます — both.

A student telling a friend about their professor uses the third. An employee telling a client about their own manager uses none of them, for reasons we will get to.

Most of your week never leaves the first level

If you are learning Japanese outside an office, です／ます carries almost everything you actually need to produce. Ordering, asking directions, talking to colleagues, apologising for being late with ～てすみません — teineigo is the correct register, not a beginner's substitute for something better.

An ending alone cannot tell you whether a choice of words is considerate. 映画なんて見たくありません retains a dismissal of films despite its polite ending. In the same way, ～たほうがいいです remains fairly firm advice even though it ends politely. The ～たらどう and ～たらいいですか contrast shows a second distinction: the speaker either proposes an action or asks the listener to supply one. A related といい and たらいい lesson separates hoped-for outcomes from listener-directed solutions. The とか・なんて・なんか comparison separates example lists, self-deprecation and reactions, including suggestions that use なんか without rejecting the idea.

The distinction between formal and polite is visible in ではないか and じゃないか: ではないか suits formal argument but remains plain style, while conversational politeness uses じゃないですか.

That register also has its own negative: the N5 negative-form lesson compares 来ません and 来ませんでした with plain 来ない and 来なかった.

A negative request uses that plain form differently: Vないでください asks the listener not to act, while Vないで followed by another verb means “without doing”.

印刷する必要はありません also ends politely: printing is unnecessary, while 印刷してはいけません would prohibit it. 印刷しなくてもいいです removes the obligation through なくてもいい. The ending and the requirement are separate choices.

For a positive requirement, が必要 and 必要がある separate a needed thing from an action that needs to be done. Their final です or あります makes the statement polite without changing that grammatical distinction.

あまり好きではありません softens a rejection; 全然好きではありません emphasizes it. Their polite ending remains identical.

An adverb can soften the claim itself: 一応 marks a status as sufficient but qualified, while わずかに reports a genuinely small degree rather than social modesty.

A polite reply can still blame a cause with せいで or use おかげで ironically.

An uncertain reply can remain polite too: かもしれません leaves a possibility open, while でしょう can offer a prediction or ask for confirmation. The listener-directed register and the speaker's commitment need separate attention. The focused でしょう and だろう comparison separates that conversational purpose from the choice between polite and plain address.

Inviting someone stays within polite speech too: ～ませんか and ～ましょう differ in how confidently you propose a shared activity, while ～ましょうか can offer your help.

If the choice is still open, Nはどうですか places a candidate before the listener, while つもり reports a plan already chosen. Both can end politely without carrying the same degree or direction of commitment.

When で carries that intention into another action, つもりで can also frame an imagined expense or role. The politeness still belongs to the following predicate; the adopted viewpoint comes from the clause before で.

What changes earlier is comprehension. Honorific forms arrive constantly from the other direction: いらっしゃいませ at the door, お待たせいたしました at the counter, ご乗車ありがとうございます on the train. You need to recognise those long before you need to construct anything like them.

The N4 shopping and service set covers the ordinary nouns beside those endings: 受付 names reception, 店員 the employee and おつり the returned change. In travel, the N1 hotels and sightseeing set separates the フロント that handles a hotel stay from the ガイド who explains the destination; the nouns themselves do not determine the polite register.

That asymmetry is worth planning around. Learn the honorific forms you hear as fixed expressions first, and treat the productive system as something you grow into when work or email demands it.

Honorific and humble are one distinction seen from both ends

Take a single verb, 行く, and a single event: someone goes to someone else's office.

If your teacher is going, they are the one acting, so you raise their action: 先生がいらっしゃいます. If you are going, you are the one acting toward someone worth deferring to, so you lower your own: 私が伺います.

Same verb, same event, two forms — and the thing that chose between them was not formality. It was whose action it is. That question, asked of every verb, is most of the system. What looks like two vocabularies to memorise is one decision with a lookup on each side.

Two patterns generate most of it, and a short list covers the rest

Two productive patterns do the bulk of the work, and they apply to ordinary verbs you already know:

• お／ご + stem + になる raises the other person: 読む → お読みになる, 帰る → お帰りになる.
• お／ご + stem + する（いたす） lowers you: 持つ → お持ちします, 案内する → ご案内いたします.

There is also the passive form used as light respect — 部長はもう帰られました — which is common in business speech and softer than お帰りになりました.

That same register keeps a separate toolkit for sentences that are not about a person at all, but about an occasion — the line before a company notice, a retirement speech, a ceremony programme. An official cutoff or launch sequence can use ～をもって or ～を皮切りに, depending on whether the sentence draws one boundary or begins a continuing series. にあたって and に際して do a different job around a significant occasion, and neither one raises or lowers anybody. A service-desk reply may instead use ～かねます to decline a request and ～かねません to warn of a risk; those endings do not raise or lower anyone either. Formal Japanese has its own way of saying why something is done, too: the classical purpose forms ～べく and ～んがため carry "in order to" where everyday Japanese would first choose between ～ように and ～ために according to the intended result and the speaker's control over it.

The same company notice can state a formal request with お～願う or ご～願う. The respectful action belongs to the reader or listener, while 願います marks what the organisation asks them to do.

An official explanation may also describe an outcome imposed by circumstances. The ～を余儀なくされる lesson shows how the affected party undergoes that constraint. Its passive ending belongs to the meaning of compulsion; a polite ending addresses the listener separately.

A reply using わけにはいきません can also sound polite while explaining why an action is unacceptable under the circumstances. 資料を見せるわけにはいきません declines to show the materials; 説明しないわけにはいきません instead says that explaining is necessary. The shared polite ending does not settle whether the speaker is refusing an action or accepting an obligation.

A ところを preface acknowledges the listener's busy moment before the request. It can introduce a request, an apology or thanks; the following clause supplies the action.

Ceremonial thanks and official apologies may use に堪えない and に忍びない to separate an overwhelming feeling from an action that compassion makes difficult. The noun or object before the ending carries most of that distinction.

A form can ask for your 希望日, a preferred date, or name 許可, permission. The N3 formal-vocabulary set separates these choices from checking with 確認 and approving with 承認.

A form or a court report can sound formal through its vocabulary too: six legal and administrative words distinguish rules, public bodies and court events without changing anyone's social status. The plainer language of courtesy works the same way: respect, humility, comfort, congratulation and apology each keep a formal verb a register above the N3 nouns for gratitude, respect and manners, which themselves sit above the everyday courtesy words of greeting, thanks and apology.

The irregular verbs are the part you genuinely have to learn as words. There are not many:

plain	respectful (their action)	humble (your action)
行く・来る・いる	いらっしゃる	伺う・参る・おる
食べる・飲む	召し上がる	いただく
言う	おっしゃる	申す・申し上げる
する	なさる	いたす
見る	ご覧になる	拝見する
知っている	ご存じだ	存じております
くれる	くださる	—
もらう	—	いただく

Eight rows give you a starting budget for ordinary keigo verbs. Formal correspondence adds lexical choices beyond this table: the five-expression letter vocabulary set covers opening and closing formulas, resumed contact, borrowing and the two directions of 賜る.

Giving and receiving make the distinction concrete: the six verbs for giving and receiving keep the same gift in view while changing the subject or the person treated respectfully. 先生がくださった and 先生からいただいた can describe the teacher’s same gift.

The rule that makes keigo look arbitrary is the group boundary

Here is the thing that breaks a learner's model, and it is not a grammar point. The same boundary first appears in family words for your own and another person's relatives: 父 in an outsider-facing answer, お父さん when asking about theirs.

Your manager is 田中部長 inside the office, and everything they do takes honorific forms. Then a client calls, and you say 田中はただいま外出しております — no title, no honorific, and a humble verb for your own superior's absence.

Nothing about rank changed. What changed is the boundary. Speaking to someone outside your company, everyone inside it is on your side, so your manager gets lowered exactly as you would lower yourself. This is 内 and 外, inside and outside, and it overrides seniority every time.

Once you have seen it, a lot of otherwise baffling office Japanese resolves. It also explains why keigo cannot really be learned from a table: the table has no column for who else is in the room.

Collect it where it happens

Keigo is one of the few things in Japanese that is easier to acquire in the wild than in a book, because every instance arrives with the exact situation that licensed it. The convenience store, the doctor's receptionist, the email from your landlord, the announcement on the platform — those are all labelled examples.

The catch is the same one that applies to any word you meet on a sign: you will not remember it by evening. A form you heard at a counter needs to be captured with its setting, or you are left with a verb ending and no idea who was allowed to say it to whom.

This is why a Japanese card needs a register note as much as it needs a reading. Kikusho puts that field on the card by default — word, reading, meaning, the politeness note, and an example sentence — so what you keep is the form plus the social distance it encodes, not a gloss you will misuse in a month.

And keigo rewards recall over recognition more brutally than ordinary vocabulary, because recognising a form you cannot produce feels exactly like knowing it right up until someone asks you a question and you have to answer in the right register.

So the honest version of learning keigo: memorise about eight verbs, learn two patterns, keep です／ます as your default, and let the rest arrive from the shop counter with its context attached.