By Claytonian
Part Two: The Shared Areas Between Thanks and Sorry
Part one is here.
Next up, I'd like to remind that a lot of times people say thanks when they should be saying sorry. I'm sorry to say that English and Japanese don't always translate equivocally, and what is normal to say in one sounds odd in the other. Imagine this situation: You drink at a local pub in your Japanese neighborhood until 3 in the morning. Then the kind old man that you have been sitting by and chatting with foots the bill. What do you say? And how about when you realize that the barkeep actually wanted to close at the posted business hours, which you have exceeded by two hours? You may be tempted to reach for the arigatou, but that is amateur stuff, and you are a Japanese pro if you have been chatting until this late. The correct thing to say to both your inebriated benefactor and your sleepy barkeep is 済みません (sumimasen). Like the expression presented in Part One of this two part article, if you've studied Japanese more than an hour you have probably heard this one too. But the usual translation for sumimasen of "sorry" is a bit shallow.
For you see, the true meaning of sumimasen was originally along the lines of "uncleared" and "unfinished". As in, "my feelings are unclear, as I feel a debt to you for doing the nice thing." That sort of "I.O.U." type of feeling you get sometimes. So when someone goes out of their way for you, or is inconvenienced by you, it's best to say you are "sorry" rather than "thankful".
I'll cover just couple more expressions. If you want to say a really formal word that kind of mixes these ambiguous concepts of apology and thankfulness, 恐れ入ります (osoreirimasu, or literally "fear enters [me]") is a pretty interesting word. I hear it when ever I go to my local combini. I usually tell the clerk I don't need a bag, and they say it in response. It's kind of like "A thousand pardons". Gotta love service industry talk! This one pops up in samurai movies too.
ごめんなさい (gomen nasai) deserves a mention here too. It means "pardon me," being made from "pardon" and the order-giving form of "do", but in actual use it doesn't sound much like an order. This one is the one I hear often in public, because people utter it after bumping into each other. It gets modified to a greeting as ごめんください (gomen kudasai, pardon the intrusion!) when you want to enter a house and are calling out to the occupant. You can also use it to say "I'm sorry, I don't want to subscribe to your newspaper" by modifying it to それはごめんだ (soreha gomen da, lit. "that's a no-thanks").
Yet another apology-greeting is 失礼します (shitsureshimasu, lit. "this is rude" but a little bit closer to "pardon me"). People use it to enter or leave an important person's room, or when they spill coffee on their boss' toupee. In the case of such a mistake we use the past form 失礼しました (shitsureishimashita). Probably in your panic, you will want to use a gomenasai or two, just in case. You might also use it when writing a blog post full of foreign terms that overwhelms the reader. Or that one may just be me.
The only other thing I should point out is if you use these expressions to talk about something that has already been done, you'll probably want to use the past tense, which isn't too hard, but beyond the scope of this article. Sorry. Remember, if you find any of the gratitude-laden expressions too hard to remember, just remember a さんきゅ! (sankyu, from the English "thank you") will get you by, all the kids use it nowadays.
Doumo!
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