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.

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 — teineigo is the correct register, not a beginner's substitute for something better.

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.

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 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. にあたって and に際して do that job, and neither one raises or lowers anybody. It 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" in writing a spoken sentence would leave to ために.

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. That is the memorisation budget for keigo, and every one of them is a verb you will hear this week if you are anywhere near a shop or an office.

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.

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.