Japanese Words #3 – Shitsurei

Written By: guyjin on October 21, 2009 No Comment

Yesterday I came across a BBC website which contains ‘Essential Phrases‘ for learning Japanese. I’ve linked it here, but you probably won’t find it particularly useful. Not least because of the fact that they have mangled some of the simple translations that they have on the site. The most aggregious of these mis-translations is of the phrase Shitsurei shimasu, which they have translated as ‘I have committed an impoliteness’.

The more that I’ve learned Japanese (and taught English), the more I’ve found myself moving away from the ‘dictionary’ or literal translation of words, and moving towards a more contextual or practical understanding. Of course, this is all part of learning a language – learning how to apply the language in a practical context, as opposed to just rote learning.

The dictionary definition of shitsurei is ‘rude, impolite, bad manners’. This is of course where the BBC got their awful translation. But while the word shitsurei on its own is often used in this context, when it is used in the form of shitsurei shimasu, it usually has very different nuance. For example, while you would use the phrase shitsurei shimasu when enterring a room or before hanging up the phone, you would not, in English, ever say ‘I have committed an impoliteness’ in such a situation. Thus by defining the phrase in this way, it gives the learner a) the wrong impression that Japanese people find everything overly rude; and/or b) no idea how to actually use the phrase, since the whole concept of being particularly rude just by entering a room or by telling someone that you are going to hang up the phone is so foreign to them.

It is far better, I have found, to translate and define terms based on their contextual meaning, as opposed to just their dictionary meaning. Thus in the examples above, rather than defining shitsurei shimasu as ‘I’m going to be rude now’, you would instead define it as something like ‘Excuse me’ (you could also say sumimasen) in the case of entering a room, or ‘Goodbye’ in the case of hanging up the phone. In the context in which they are used, this is precisely the meaning that they hold for the person to whom you are speaking. In my experience, a Japanese person will not respond to your saying shitsurei shimasu upon entering a room by saying ‘yes, how rude of you’, but rather by acknowledging your presence much as would be the case if someone were to say ‘excuse me’ to a native English speaker.

In the same way with hanging up the phone, I find no evidence that Japanese people, upon having someone say shitsurei shimasu and hang up the phone, respond by feeling like the person on the other end has just been rather impolite… Instead, they simply feel that this was a polite was to signal that they were about to hang up the phone – much as we would use the word ‘goodbye’ in English.

There are several different contexts in which the phrase shitsurei shimasu can be used, and I have highlighted just two of them here, which make use of the phrase almost idiomatically. There are many words and phrases like this in Japanese, and I’m sure I will go over some more of them in future parts of this series. Many of them do not translate easily into English, and when translated clumsily can make it very difficult to understand how they should be used. By learning their definitions in a more contextual and practical manner however, the terms seem much less ‘alien’, and can be much easier and more comfortable to use.