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Lesson 17: Using です and ます

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Today we're going to talk about formal Japanese: desu/masu.

Some people may be surprised that we've gone for sixteen lessons without using this at all, when most courses use it from the very first lesson.

Now, there are good reasons why we haven't.

One reason is that desu/masu form is actually quite eccentric.

It does various things that most of the rest of Japanese doesn't do.

So if we learn this as the standard way to speak, we get all sorts of strange ideas about the way Japanese works.

We could have started learning it a little earlier, but frankly I think that there are more important priorities and that it's a good idea to get real, standard Japanese firmly fixed in our minds before we enter the rather troubled area of desu/masu.

It isn't difficult once you have very firmly established standard Japanese structures in your mind, and we've done that now.

If you haven't done it yet, if you haven't followed this course, please go back to the first lesson right now.

Off you go.

Right.

Now for the rest of you, let's start with "masu".

"Masu" is a verb.

It's not part of a verb, it's a verb in itself.

It's a helper verb like lots of other helper verbs that we've looked at up to this point.

It attaches to our old friend the i-stem, and it doesn't change the meaning of the word it attaches to in any way.

It simply makes it formal.

So "aruku" becomes "arukimasu"; "hanasu" becomes "hanashimasu", and so forth.

And they're simply the formal way of saying "speak", "walk", etc.

Now, another reason I didn't teach this earlier is because people say there are only two irregular verbs in Japanese – I've said this myself – but the truth is that there is another one, and it's "masu".

And "masu" isn't irregular in the way that "kuru" and "suru" are irregular.

It's much worse.

It does something that is done nowhere else in modern Japanese.

Now the good news is that the past tense is completely regular and normal.

It works the same way as any other su-ending verb: it's "mashita".

But the negative is not "masanai"; it's "masen".

And what kind of a word is "masen"?

It's really nothing that exists in modern Japanese at all.

The textbooks tell us that it's the negative form of the verb, but then they tell us that the verb is whatever "masu" is attached to, and they also tell us that "nai" is the negative form of a verb when it's nothing of the sort.

It's a helper adjective.

We don't need to go into what "masen" actually is, structurally, because it doesn't happen anywhere else in modern Japanese, so we just learn it as a fact.

The negative of "masu" is "masen".

And that's another reason I didn't teach it earlier, because there isn't much of this in Japanese: things that you just have to learn "as a fact".

If you know the principles behind things, generally speaking you can understand how everything works without a lot of memorization.

So when you start off learning that you just have to learn that the negative of "masu-verbs", as they're called – in other words, the masu-helper verb – is "masen", you start off with the idea that Japanese just does various random things like a European language.

Now, the negative past gets even stranger.

There isn't any past of -sen, the way -nai becomes -nakatta, so what do we do?

We just throw the past tense of "desu" on to the end of "masen" and say "masen deshita".

"Arukimasen deshita" – "I didn't walk".

A lot of Japanese people who study Japanese grammar really dislike this, and I can't blame them.

But it has, for better or worse, become standard Japanese grammar, so we just have to remember it.

It's really only a couple of irregularities and they're not really difficult to remember just so long as we don't learn them at the beginning, where they confuse our whole understanding of Japanese.

If we learn "masu" as a so-called "conjugation" and we believe that that is the base-form of the verb, then to make other forms of verbs we find ourselves taking off the -masu and then changing the i-stem for a different kind of stem in order to do something else.

Which would be complicated enough if we knew about stems but the textbooks don't tell us that either, so we've just got a lot of completely random European-style rules and regulations that make no sense at all.

So let's move on to "desu".

"Desu", as you know, is the formal version of "da".

It's the copula.

It works exactly like "da", so if you know "da", you know "desu" already.

Except that this also has a strange quirk, which is that if we take an adjective like "akai" meaning "is red", we put "desu" on to the end of it in formal speech.

It doesn't do anything; it just decorates the sentence and makes it formal.

Again, this is something you just have to learn and it's not very difficult to learn, but if you learn it at the beginning you get the impression that you need the copula with an adjective like "akai" just as you need the copula with an adjectival noun like "kirei".

And of course the fact that they call adjectival nouns "na-adjectives" just makes it even more confusing.

You think that adjectives take the copula and they don't.

Real adjectives, i-adjectives, do not take the copula except that in the rather strange desu/masu form, we pop "desu" on the end just for decoration.

Adjectival nouns, on the other hand, of course do take the copula because they're nouns – and all nouns take the copula.

So we say "akai" – "is red" / "kirei da" – "is pretty"; "akai desu" – "is red" with a decoration; "kirei desu" – "is pretty" with the proper copula that it needs in the formal form.

So as you see, formal Japanese is not really all that difficult.

We have to learn a few rather strange facts, and it's not like most of the rest of Japanese which is terribly Lego-like and logical.

It's got little quirky bits and pieces to it, but not many and so long as you've got real Japanese fixed firmly in your mind, adding on desu/masu form is not particularly difficult.

A couple of other things worth knowing: one of the things is that as well as saying "masen", we can also say "nai desu".

So we can say "Sakura-ga hanashimasen" – "Sakura doesn't talk", or we can say "Sakura-ga hanasanai desu".

And that of course is perfectly logical and sensible, if any of it is, because since we put "desu" on to the end of adjectives in formal speech, we can also put it on to the end of the nai-helper adjective, which is really just another adjective.

We don't make many changes to "masu" because it really is a sentence-ender; we put it right at the end of whatever else we're doing in order to add formality to the sentence.

However, we can use both "desu" and "masu" with the volitional helper verb.

And once again "masu" behaves eccentrically, because its o-stem is not, as you would expect, "maso" but "masho".

So the volitional form is "mashou".

Fortunately, this is only slightly eccentric and not diffcult to manage.

And also fortunately, "desu" forms a matching pair with "masu" in the volitional form and becomes "deshou".

And since we're raising the subject of the volitional, let's cover that too.

Its formation is very simple, and it's one of the few things that we do with the o-stem of verbs.

The godan volitional helper, like the potential helper – potential helper is just a single kana, る(-ru), and the volitional helper is just the single kanaう(-u), and we put it on to the end of the o-stem and it lengthens the o-sound.

So, "hanasu" becomes " hanasou", "aruku" becomes "arukou" and so forth.

What does it mean?

Well, the name really tells you what it means.

"Volition" means "will", so the volitional expresses or invokes the will.

The most usual use of it is setting the will of a group of people in a particular direction.

So we say, "Ikimashou", "Let's go".

And some people call the tai-helper adjective volitional as well, which is confusing because they aren't the same thing.

And the thing here to remember is that -tai expresses desire, want, wanting to do something.

The volitional form expresses will.

And will and desire aren't the same thing.

For example, you may have a will to do your homework.

It doesn't mean that you want to do your homework.

What you actually want is to play "Captain Toad", but you set your will to doing your homework.

And when we say things like "ikou", "let's go", for things that we might all want to do, "let's all have a picnic", "let's have a party", but also "let's tidy the room", "let's do our homework."

It's expressing will, not want.

You'll very often see on Japanese signs things like, "gomi-wo mochikaeri-mashou" – "let's pick up our trash and take it home" – which always seems to me like quite a nice kind of exhortation, rather different from the Western signs that say, "Pick up your rubbish or we'll confiscate your car and dye your children purple".

Now, there are a number of uses of the volitional along with particles like -ka and -to, but we're not going to go into them here, because I don't think that learning lists of usages is a good way to learn.

We'll tackle these as we come to them, perhaps in the course of Alice's adventures.

But one use of this form that is worth knowing because you'll see it pretty often is that we use the volitional form of the copula, "da" or "desu" – "da", which isn't really a verb in the usual sense, the volitional is "darou" ­– and if we add that to any other sentence it gives the meaning of "probably".

"Sore-wa akai deshou" – "That's probably red/I think it's red"; "Sakura-ga kuru deshou" – "I think Sakura's coming/ Sakura's probably coming".

So now we know how to use the volitional and how to use formal Japanese.

So, "ikimashou" – Let's go.