Sentence Enders In Gendered Language
“As far as I’m concerned, being any gender is a drag.” - Patti Smith
At some point or another, every Japanese language learner runs into “gendered language.” Some of you will immediately be like “yeah, I totally know what that is because I have it in my language.” Others will have no idea what this is, so I’ll give you the quick version.
Gendered language is basically the idea that some words / grammar are more feminine and others are more masculine.
Some languages, I know, consider it incorrect if you use a feminine form when you’re a man, and a masculine form when you’re a woman. In Japanese, it’s a little different. Technically, there’s nothing incorrect about using feminine or masculine speech when you’re not “supposed” to. If you do, it’s not wrong… it just sounds a little off. You just sound a little more girly / manly than people expect, or you just sound a bit funny.
A lot of men learning Japanese have the problem of learning a more feminine Japanese (because Japanese teachers tend to mainly be women). For women, it’s actually a little easier. If you do use more masculine forms, you just sound like a tom-boy, which I don’t think is quite as bad.
Either way, though, you’re going to want to make an effort to use the right things in Japanese. It’s not actually that hard, as long as you know what’s what. Luckily for you, sentence enders probably make up 40-50% of everything you’ll need to know about Japanese gendered language. That should make things easier for you, once you know these.
So now, we’re going to go through the rest of the sentence enders, and we’re going to do it by gender. No matter what, you should go through both of them and learn about both of them. Why? Because it’s just as important to know what not to do as it is to know what to do. That way, if you run into something in the wild, you’ll know “hey, I learned not to use that because I’m a girl/guy, cool.”
Of course, we need to be polite. Ladies first!