Japanese annoys me sometimes, especially now. Apart from trying to use interesting and colourful grammar expressions in prep for JLPT2 only to have them all corrected to 〜たら or some other form I studied years ago (OK, I give up, I’ll just learn to read these new forms and just say ‘when’ for everything in conversation), I’m also coming across bad habits I’m having to unlearn and fundamental problems of which the nuance is becoming very difficult to grasp. I’ll share three points with you today. Please feel free to shoot them down in flames and then vaporize the ashes, it’ll learn me.

1) だ vs です

Read this – http://www.guidetojapanese.org/polite.html#part5
Then read this – http://www.guidetojapanese.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3567

We are always taught that です is the polite form of だ.
That’s not true thou. The second author confuses です with other polite forms hence he feels they are equivalent, I think.

です is, as far as I’m aware, just a way of making a sentence polite for the most part. As the first author explains. It seems that way from my experience too. One such example was today when a receptionist replied back to me ‘I’m fine desu yo’. Here desu and yo seem to have no meaning other than to politen and emphasize the English sentence, which is already correctly is-afied.

だ on the other hand has many uses, some of which would be ‘is’, but one of which is not ‘is’. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been corrected when putting a だ at the end of a sentence thinking it’s a substitute for です。Even if I’m right some times, I’m wrong so many others to the point that a rule we learn at the start that だ＝です meaning wise if not politeness wise is kinda counter productive.

2) はい = yes

I have a feeling I have to stop saying はい when a shop assistant asks if I want a bag. I’m thinking they only know I want one because I nod viciously while saying it

http://home.att.net/~keiichiro/gokai/eng/yesno.html
http://www.thirteenmonths.com/jp02_winterwonderland.htm
http://hobby_elec.piclist.com/e_japanese3_8.htm

Hai can mean a lot of things, one of them I heard a long time ago is ‘yes, I’m listening’, rather than ‘yes, in answer to your question’. It’s possible I’m just proving to the shop assistant that I’m not deaf. I’m sure my ‘hai’ has not a hint of a question tone and yet for some reason they’ve occasionally looked at me confused. At least until I nod.

3) 〜ている / 〜ていた

I have a further feeling that this doesn’t mean the same as the present/past continuous in English. There as so many places were that rule breaks down crying to the embarrassment of all around it. I’m fine with the verbs that do use continuous forms in English but not in Japanese, and those which use ‘〜ている’ in Japanese but not present continuous in English (the famous 犬が死んでいる＊ for the Japanese dog that’s been dead for hours while its English counterpart writhes in agony, his final minutes ticking endlessly on before he snuffs it – as in ‘The dog is dying’). I’m also down with using it for other people’s actions, as the past continuous seems to be used for a lot. But it’s still damn confusing having my past sentences corrected to a ‘continuous form’ with no rhyme or reason, at least to mine eyes.

Investigations continue.
PLEASE HELP ME

（＊）Or is it 犬は死んでいる。This is another thing I’ve been wrestling with recently. See this blog post and replies by native speakers.

Disclaimer. In trying to make this interesting to read I may have been too liberal with the irony ketchup. I am English. I find it amusing to use sarcasm and irony. By the way, they are not the same thing, Japanese language. Don’t look away, I’m talking to you!