Your First Conversation With a Japanese Friend: Going Casual

How the first casual chat usually goes

A first casual conversation rarely starts casual. It starts in the polite forms you both used on the day you met, and at some point, often in the first ten minutes of a second or third meeting, one of you suggests relaxing. From there it is messy on both sides: plain forms, then a desu by habit, then a laugh about it. Knowing this shape stops you from treating the mixed phase as failure.

Tameguchi is the word Japanese speakers use for talking as equals, without honorifics. Asking tameguchi de ii? is itself a casual sentence, so it only works with someone your age or at a setting like a language exchange where equality is assumed. With a senior, a boss or a friend's parent, the answer to the question is already no, and you do not ask.

Switching from desu and masu to casual

The whole switch is a matter of sentence endings, and a learner who changes only those sounds casual immediately. Drop desu, turn masu verbs into their dictionary form, let questions rise in tone instead of ending in ka, and replace ja arimasen with ja nai. That is the first week's worth. Casual vocabulary, softer particles and the plain past can come later, one at a time.

Notice what did not change: sumimasen, arigatō, the names with san. Casual speech is not the same as dropping courtesy, and most Japanese friends keep thanking and apologising to each other all day in casual form. The thing to drop is the grammar, not the manners.

Questions that invite a story

A polite first meeting runs on facts: where from, what job, how long in Japan. A friendship runs on stories, and stories come from questions about what people do and like, not what they are. Build the question from a question word, nani, doko, nande, itsu, and end it with a casual no, which softens it and makes it sound genuinely curious. Then wait. Silence after a question is not awkward in Japanese; it is the other person thinking.

Hamaru, to be hooked on something, is the word friends use for hobbies and obsessions, and saikin hamatteru koto aru? is a better opener than shumi wa nan desu ka, which sounds like a form. Sore, dō iu koto? is your best friend when a story loses you: it asks for a rephrase without admitting you lost the thread.

Reacting like a friend

Casual conversation has its own set of listening sounds, and they are what make a Japanese speaker feel they are talking to a friend rather than to a learner. Sō desu ka becomes sō nan da; hontō desu ka becomes maji de or uso. Overdo any one and it sounds like a comedy sketch, so rotate three or four. A few are marked by age or gender, and the notes below say so.

Wakaru, said with a nod, is one of the most friend-making words in Japanese: it means I get it, I feel the same. Sore na is current slang among younger speakers and will date you if you are not young. De, dō natta no? is the line that asks for the end of the story, and a friend who asks it is a friend who was listening.

A small story of your own

At some point they will ask what you did at the weekend, and a casual answer is a short story in plain past tense: what, where, one thing that went wrong, how it ended. Three or four sentences are plenty. Casual storytelling uses te-form chains with chatte for the small disasters, meccha for very, and kekkyoku for how it turned out, and it leaves subjects and particles out wherever the meaning survives.

Meccha began as Kansai speech and is now casual everywhere, especially among younger people; in Tokyo you will also hear chō. Kedo trailing off at the end of a sentence is a casual softener, like the English though, and friends use it constantly. A story told this way, even with mistakes, sounds like a person talking, not a textbook exercise.

Plans for next time

The difference between a pleasant chat and a friendship is whether a second meeting is set. In casual Japanese the invitation is a negative question, ikanai? (won't you go?), which sounds softer than ikō (let's go) and gives the other person room to decline. Add kondo (next time, sometime) to keep it loose, then narrow it to a day if they sound keen. Contact details are exchanged by messaging app, and the natural line for that is a casual suggestion rather than a request.

Tanoshimi ni shiteru, I'm looking forward to it, is the casual version of tanoshimi ni shite imasu, and it is the warmest way to end. Un is the casual hai; use it with a nod. If the other person answers an invitation with kondo ne (sometime, yeah) and no day, that can be a soft decline; let it go and try again another time.

Register notes and the mistakes that sound rude

Casual Japanese has levels inside it. The forms in this post are the friendly middle: plain verbs, soft particles, no honorifics. Below that is the rough speech of anime heroes and tired men in bars, and that is the layer learners accidentally borrow. A few rules keep you in the middle.

• Going casual with someone older or senior before they do. Age and seniority still shape speech between friends; many pairs stay polite in one direction for years.
• Using omae or kimi for you. Use the person's name, or no pronoun at all. Anata to a friend sounds stiff or oddly intimate.
• Ending sentences in zo, ze or ka yo. These are rough, mostly male and often confrontational; ne, yo and no are the friendly endings.
• Switching to casual with your friend's friends automatically. New person, polite start, until invited.
• Dropping sumimasen and arigatō along with desu. Courtesy words stay.
• Apologising for every mixed sentence. Nobody is counting, and a desu that slips out is normal.

How it feels, honestly

The first time you say a plain-form sentence to a Japanese person's face, it feels rude. It is not; it is what they asked for, and the small smile you get in return is relief, because polite speech is tiring for them too. For the next half hour you will mix forms, catch yourself, and mix them again. Your friend will do a bit of the same, because they are adjusting their speed and vocabulary for you.

What surprises most learners is how much faster casual conversation moves, and how much more of it is reaction rather than content. You will say wakaru and sō nan da more than any sentence with a verb in it, and that is fine. The sign that it went well is not grammatical: it is that you have a day and a place written down for next time.

Practise going casual without the awkwardness

The switch is easier to rehearse than to improvise. Tell Mocchi, Unihongo's study assistant, that you want to chat about your weekend in casual Japanese, and ask it to note every place you drift back into desu or masu, then explain the plain form you should have used. Because it keeps track of the endings you keep missing, the next chat starts with a reminder. For a message to a friend, /correct with the note casual, same age makes sure the register matches.

Then say it out loud. In AI Sensei, Ibuki-sensei can play a classmate: pick the hobbies topic, ask to switch to casual speech from the start, and tell a weekend story with one small disaster in it. The session report shows which plain forms came out right and which sentences still ended in desu. Signing in with a free account at unihongo.com/login opens both the chat and the classroom.