Japanese can be roughly separated into three levels of politeness: casual, polite, and honorific/humble. So far, we have already gone over the polite forms using 「～です」 and 「～ます」. We will now cover the next level of politeness using honorific and humble forms. You will often hear this type of language in any customer/consumer type situations such as fast food counters, restaurants, etc. For now, the first thing to remember is that the speaker always considers himself/herself to be at the lowest level. So any actions performed by oneself are in humble form while actions performed by anyone else seen from the view of the speaker uses the honorific form.
The difficult part of learning honorific and humble language is that there are a number of words that have separate verbs for honorific and humble forms. Anything that does not have its own special expression fall under the general rules of humble and honorific conjugations that we will cover next.
| Plain | Honorific | Humble |
|---|---|---|
| する | なさる | 致す |
| 行く | いらっしゃる／おいでになる | 参る |
| 来る | いらっしゃる／おいでになる | 参る |
| いる | いらっしゃる／おいでになる | おる |
| 見る | ご覧になる | 拝見する |
| 聞く | － | 伺う |
| 言う | おっしゃる | 申す／申し上げる |
| あげる | － | 差し上げる |
| くれる | 下さる | － |
| もらう | － | いただく |
| 食べる | 召し上がる | いただく |
| 飲む | 召し上がる | いただく |
| 知っている | ご存知（です） | 存じる |
A number of these verbs do not follow the normal masu-conjugation rules and they include: 「なさる」、「いらっしゃる」、「おっしゃる」、「下さる」、 and 「ござる」 (which we will soon cover). For all masu-form tenses of these verbs, instead of the 「る」 becoming a 「り」 as it does with normal u-verbs, it instead becomes an 「い」. All other conjugations besides the masu-form do not change from regular u-verbs.
| Plain | ます-form | Past ます-form | Negative ます-form | Past-negative ます-form |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| なさる | なさいます | なさいました | なさいません | なさいませんでした |
| いらっしゃる | いらっしゃいます | いらっしゃいました | いらっしゃいません | いらっしゃいませんでした |
| おっしゃる | おっしゃいます | おっしゃいました | おっしゃいません | おっしゃいませんでした |
| 下さる | 下さいます | 下さいました | 下さいません | 下さいませんでした |
| ござる | ございます | ございました | ございません | ございませんでした |
We can now begin to see that 「ください」 is just a special conjugation of 「下さる」 which is the honorific version of 「くれる」. Let's look at some actual examples. Since these examples are all questions directed directly to someone (second person), they all use the honorific form.
The following examples are all actions done by the speaker so they all use the humble form.
In addition to these set expressions, there are some words that also have more polite counterparts. Probably the most important is the politer version of 「ある」, which is 「ござる」. This verb can be used for both inanimate and animate objects. It is neither honorific nor humble but it is a step above 「ある」 in politeness. However, unless you want to sound like a samurai, 「ござる」 is always used in the polite form: 「ございます」.
By extension, the politer version of 「です」 is 「でございます」. This is essentially the masu-form conjugation of 「でござる」, which comes from 「である」 literally meaning, "to exist as" (to be covered much later).
Other examples include 「いい」, which is more formally expressed as 「よろしい」. There are also six different ways to say, "I'm sorry" (not counting 「悪いね」 or slight inflection changes like 「すいません」).
Successively politer expressions for apologizing:
In addition, the politest suffix for names is 「様」, one level above 「さん」. You won't be using this suffix too often in actual speech even if you speak to that person in honorific/humble speech. However, expect to use it when writing letters even to people you are somewhat familiar with. Also, service people such as cashiers or waitresses/waiters will normally refer to the customer as 「お客様」. Of course, royalty and deities are always accompanied by 「様」 such as 「神様」.
For all other verbs without set expressions, there are conjugation rules to change them into honorific and humble forms. They both involve a common practice of attaching a polite prefix 「御」. In Japanese, there is an practice of attaching an honorific prefix 「御」 to certain (not all) nouns to show politeness. In fact, some words like 「お酒」、 「お茶」、or 「お金」 come with this prefix so often that it's become practically the word itself. In general, 「御」 is written in hiragana as either 「ご」 for words read as 音読み （例： ご意見、ご飯） or 「お」 for words read as 訓読み （例： お金、 お仕事）. In fact, you may have been using this prefix already without realizing it like 「お好み焼き」 or 「お土産」. There are some exceptions to this rule such as 「お返事」. Luckily since 「御」 is rarely written in kanji, identifying the exceptions should not really be a problem.
The honorific form of verbs that are not among the set honorific expressions given above can be formed in two different ways.
This kind of makes sense if you think of it as a person becoming the honorific state of a verb. All subsequent conjugations follow the normal rules of conjugating the u-verb 「なる」. To be honest, this type of sentence formulation is rarely used.
Service people want to be extra polite so they will often use this type of "double honorific" conjugation or 二重敬語 (in this case, the honorific 「召し上がる」 combined with the honorific conjugation). Whether it's necessary or grammatically proper is another story.
You can also use 「下さい」 with a honorific verb by replacing 「になる」 with 「ください」. This is useful for when you want to ask somebody to do something but still use a honorific verb.
Yet another often-used expression.
Similarly, with 「ご覧になる」, you simply replace 「になる」 with 「ください」.
This works for other nouns as well. For example, riding the trains...
Humble verbs are formed in the following fashion.
Humble Conjugation: お + stem + する
You've probably already heard the first example many times before but now you know exactly where it comes from.
You'll hear something like example 4 when, for example, you need to get change after paying 1000 yen. Again, the 二重敬語 where 「する」 has been converted to the humble 「致す」 form when it's already in the お+stem+する humble form. Some Japanese people complain that this makes no sense and that 「から」 should really be 「を」.
We learned how to make polite requests using 「～ください」 in a previous section and we just looked at how to use honorific verbs with requests as well. However, there is yet another way to make requests using honorific verbs. This grammar only applies to the honorific verbs with special 「～ます」 conjugations that we just covered. This includes 「下さる」、「いらっしゃる」、「なさる」、and 「おっしゃる」. I've never actually seen this used with 「おっしゃる」, but it is grammatically possible.
Now you finally know where grammar such as 「しなさい」 and 「してください」 actually came from. Let's look at a few quick examples.
You'll probably hear this one a million times every time you enter some kind of store in Japan.
However, a middle-aged sushi chef will probably use the abbreviated version.
Some more examples...