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It's really hard to overstate just how bloated emails are in Japanese. They seem to follow a very strict script. Once you learn the key words, it's easy to writ
by fiblye 9y ago
It's really hard to overstate just how bloated emails are in Japanese. They seem to follow a very strict script. Once you learn the key words, it's easy to write and understand, but it's so much fluff for so little meaning. I've gotten dozens of lines from single emails just asking me about confirming a skype interview date, while any normal English message would literally be no more than, "Sure, let's talk at X:XX PM. Contact us beforehand if you have any troubles."
- avar 9y agoCompanies do this via E-Mail? Where I work you send someone a Google Calendar invite and they click "yes" or "no", and they can see if you have a free spot in your schedule beforehand, so it rarely goes wrong.
- striking 9y agoGoogle Calendar invites are still transferred over email, generally.
- avar 9y agoSure, but the transport part isn't relevant to what the GP is mentioning, which is that apparently Japanese etiquette requires you to write some amazingly long E-Mail. With a calendar invite all that's abstracted away and you just get "can you make it at such-and-such date at such-and-such time? yes/no/maybe".
- oliverlundquist 9y agoI've been living and working in Japan for 10+ years and totally know that feeling .. I even wrote an article about it: https://getworkjapan.com/2018/02/26/why-are-japanese-business-mails-so-long/ https://getworkjapan.com/2018/02/26/why-are-japanese-busines...
- Erlangolem 9y agoIt doesn’t necessarily make anything easier that the natural default of courtesy in Japan is, when in doubt, “maximum formality is employed.” To be honest though, I prefer the sometimes confusing formality of Japan to the curtness (or downright rudeness) of the US. Especially when it comes to customer service, the people pumping your gas in Japan are more friendly and polite than most waiters in Michelin starred restaurants in the US.
- chrischen 9y agoYea there’s a weird disjointness where customer service or service industry workers can be relatively rude or arrogant in person, but online you get the super courteous maximally formal (although usually templated) emails.
- humanrebar 9y agoFor what it's worth, people tend to be more courteous in smaller and more rural areas of the U.S.
- markbnj 9y agoTend? Perhaps. I've lived, worked and traveled all over the U.S. The smallest town I lived in was Sherwood, Maryland (population 44 at the time), and I now live an hour outside NYC. It really totally depends on the person you're interacting with, their personality, the kind of day they're having, the days they had before that. Culture certainly determines a lot of it, but that is harder to reduce to small town/big town dynamics. In America some of our most densely populated places (i.e. New Jersey) have some of the lowest rates of depression and suicide. People may appear to be ruder to each other in those places, or not, but something about the proximity of so many other humans creates some sort of social behavioral order that allows them to get along. People are strange, is really the tl;dr.
- username223 9y ago> People are strange, is really the tl;dr. My tl;dr would be "the US is big and complicated." I've seen people working stressful service jobs be incredibly polite in Houston, and baristas being checked-out jerks in small-town Colorado. Overall, I would say that people tend to be more polite when they have more mental energy to spend. That tends to be in quieter towns, but not always.
- chrischen 9y agoI read his sample bloated email and found it interesting that they are writing it in the exact same way a (US) business would write a customer service email.
- farnsworthy 9y agoAgreed, it's a simple, polite request to a business partner. George says: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usN3rpfFoGA&t=30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usN3rpfFoGA&t=30s
- sirn 9y agoThere are also small details that you will learn the first time doing it wrong. For example, when contacting with someone outside of the company, you would NEVER refer to anyone in the same company as you with -san honorific (Mr./Ms.) via email even in maximum formality mode, e.g. "I'll forward this to Tanaka-san, head of sales" may be considered rude. Instead, you will have to skip -san, as in "I'll forward this to Tanaka, head of sales." These small details are so subtle and there's a lot of them. Many people don't really mind if you use it wrong, but some do, so you have to always be cautious with.
- CydeWeys 9y agoInteresting rule. Do you know why that is? Is there some implied level of familiarity with coworkers?
- sirn 9y agoIIRC from what my senior explained to me few years ago, this has to do with the inward and outward aspect of the Japanese business society and the Japanese language itself. The Japanese honorific is usually used from inward to the outward (e.g. to stranger, customer, partner, etc.) I think the easiest way to think might be that you won't refer to your sister/brother with honorifics when talking about them with someone. When you (an outsider) email a company, everyone in the company who replied to the email are considered belonging to the same group, so they should not use honorifics to refer to themselves regardless whether they are CEO or just random employee (even if you call them with honorifics in internal email.) There's also another small rule regarding this, such as you can say something like "Uchida, the CEO" (CEOの内田) but NOT "CEO Uchida" (内田CEO) because the title in the latter is being used as a suffix, and considered a honorific (equivalent to -san). It's a weird rule.
- rangibaby 9y agoTalking about your own “team” honorably (-san) is not humble. To be fair Japanese people have trouble with it all the time too; There are tons of results for on Google for phrase + polite or phrase + business
- 9y ago
- ilamont 9y agoI consulted for a Vietnamese tech company some years ago and was surprised to see that most internal emails among top management (most of whom had attended university overseas) were in English, rather than Vietnamese. The reason? Written Vietnamese is too formal, and they prefer English for getting to the point quickly.
- freddie_mercury 9y agoI find this explanation for their choice hard to believe. I live in Vietnam, speak Vietnamese, and see millions of people post not-formal, to-the-point things on Facebook and Instagram every day.
- dfcowell 9y agoOh, don't be daft. You're comparing the way people act and speak on Facebook with how they are expected to act in a formal setting such as work? Totally different ball game.
- wink 9y agoMaybe I should rethink how informal I speak at work. Or how formal I speak to my friends. I absolutely think there are people where there's a huge gap and others where it's hardly noticeable ;)
- coconut_crab 9y agoI'm Vietnamese, some of us prefer English as it lack the formality for pronouns, those who have studied oversea are even more likely to use English in their daily conversation. (interestingly, my friends point out that I seem to have different personality when using English instead of my mother language)
- samastur 9y agoI am a native Slovenian speaker who speaks a bunch of different languages to varying degrees of "speak". I definitely feel each of them changes my personality somewhat in its own way. I assume part of it is due the language used and part due to cultural traits you pick up when you learned it. Would be surprised if there was no feedback loop between language and cultures that use it.