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Garlstadt

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  1. It's a thing! Thank you for another excellent post, with a balanced point of view that gave me food for thought. I find honorifics very inelegant in a translation, but I understand a case can be made for them. One thing I always wonder is how proficient in Japanese those who defend honorifics as very important are. Yes, those little words are omnipresent and carry information... But in everyday life, their use is mostly automatic (you could draw a simple flowchart to accurately determine which honorific to use in most cases), so whether they are really all that meaningful is debatable, and Japanese people don't seem to care that much about them. What's more interesting is when someone uses the wrong (or no) honorific for effect, e.g. jokingly calling a friend -sama, or defiantly dropping the -san when talking to your boss. Even then, though, there are ways to convey those nuances in English. All the languages in the world that aren't Japanese have made do without honorifics just fine.
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