Shiro's Weekly Japanese Lesson
Lesson #2: "Greetings and Farewells"
Now that we've learned how to introduce ourselves in the previous lesson, let's learn other ways to greet people and to say goodbye! Let's start with learning how to say good morning.
Now if you want to include the name of who you're saying good morning to, just add their last name.
"Ohiyo Gozaimasu (their last name) san!"
It is respectful and important in Japan to refer to people that are a higher ranked than you with their last name. "San" is also respectful to add after their last name.
If you're saying good morning to people you don't need to be formal around, then you would use this example.
It's just a shortened way of saying good morning. You don't have to refer to the person with their last name this time, but if you want to, you can just add their first name instead. In most cases, when saying hello to a friend they would say this example.
In this example, we used a girl's first name. "Chan" is added at the end of her name as a way of referring to her as a mutual or lower ranked person than yourself. For example, you would add "chan" at the end of your sister's name.
If you're saying good morning to a friend that's a guy, then you would use this example.
All that we changed was the name to a boy's name and the "chan" into "kun". "Kun" is basically the same reason used as "chan", except it's only used to refer to boys like for an example, your brother.
Now if you want to say good afternoon/evening, all you do is change "Ohiyo gozaimasu" or "Ohiyo" to "Konnbawa".
Let's start learning how to say goodbye in Japanese! If you're saying goodbye. This is the formal and basic way of saying goodbye.
How about saying goodbye to friends? Well, it's really simple. All you would say is "Ja-ne!" Or some people even say "Ja!" and "Bye bye!" These are all informal versions of saying goodbye.
If it's night time, and you're saying good night to someone. Then you would say this.
Formal way is "Oyasumi nasai!" or the informal way is "Oyasumi!"
Of course for the formal way you can add the last name of the person you're talking to. That's if you want to be polite, like talking to your boss or co-worker, etc.
In a house hold, when someone comes home from work or school for an example, usually you would say "Okaiyori (their name)!" Meaning you welcome them back home. When you leave you would say "Itarashai (their name)!".
