Writing Business Letters

[maraboutslim]

God, you have absolutely no ability to recognize non-literal language. Get a sense of humor, dude.

In the end, the difference between you and me is that I was merely expressing an opinion, one based on my own experience, but nevertheless one I softened by maybes and perhapses, since i recognize things are different for everyone. Just presenting something to think about. Shooting the shit the way the boys at the pub do. I criticize no one for holding a differing view. After all, we've all had different experiences and have different needs to get through the day.

You on the other hand are so stuck on your own superiority that you take joy in telling other people they are full of shit because it's not possible that your own experience doesn't apply to every other human being and that your way of seeing the world might not be correct for every possible situation. What a burden it must be always needing to be Right with a capital R.

Try this: write about the topic. express your opinion. don't focus on dissing other people's opinions. write your own and let it stand up there to be judged by the audience for its usefulness.

[kusai Jijii]

I learned about Japan and how to speak Japanese from my bandmates and surfing friends .

Sure you did! You're a cunning linguist! Talk about suckers! I mean those guys like TT and Mullie (no, not you Charles) must have really been wasting their time with all that formal study crap...

[ttjereth]

God, you have absolutely no ability to recognize non-literal language. Get a sense of humor, dude.

There's nothing funny about you giving bad advice.

i was trying to express the idea that if akatsuka is writing a business letter in Japanese, or conducting business in Japanese, it might be more successful to NOT stress about being perfect with the keigo and all that crap. They don't expect us to know it and i suspect the times it scores us positive points will be offset by the times it either makes the reader uncomfortable or makes them think someone else wrote the letter for us.

In the end, the difference between you and me is that I was merely expressing an opinion, one based on my own experience, but nevertheless one I softened by maybes and perhapses, since i recognize things are different for everyone. Just presenting something to think about. Shooting the shit the way the boys at the pub do. I criticize no one for holding a differing view. After all, we've all had different experiences and have different needs to get through the day.

You on the other hand are so stuck on your own superiority that you take joy in telling other people they are full of shit because it's not possible that your own experience doesn't apply to every other human being and that your way of seeing the world might not be correct for every possible situation. What a burden it must be always needing to be Right with a capital R.

Try this: write about the topic. express your opinion. don't focus on dissing other people's opinions. write your own and let it stand up there to be judged by the audience for its usefulness.

Actually I take no joy in conversing with you at all, and this has nothing to do with my "superiority", it has to do with you spouting nonsense and talking out of your ass. I notice you didn't bother to respond to anything about your "business connections", is this because you made them up too?

You do realize all the crap you've posted is still there for everyone to read right?

sorry, i was a 90s gaijin, but no longer. sure, i can think of cases where gaijin may want to write perfect formal business letters. i can't think of too many cases where it would score them any more points than a non-perfect letter.

The Japanese don't expect us to be like them, in fact don't think we can be, and feel weird the closer we get to that possibility.

But this thread was not about writing a decent business letter with a freakin' comment about the weather up front and all that crap anyone knows after a month in Japan. It was about Keigo! He was stressing because his wasn't perfect. Well, few Japanese people under 40 are any good at it either.

I just didn't want to see the guy coming off like one of those mormon dudes on tv with the country dialects or whatever. Their japanese is good, but they are on tv because they are circus freaks. Whatever happen to just writing the freakin' letter and letting its content be interesting enough to get attention, not how authentically Japanese it is in its fake humility. it's an anachronism that needs to die anyway.

Point out the "maybes and perhapses" in those for me.

[maraboutslim]

it's in the tone, which as I've said , you seem to be missing. Try not assuming that everyone is so prescriptive in their opinions as you like to be, consider the possibility that most of us use this website to rant and vent about life as gaijin and not as an academic forum for pronouncements. Give people the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming and going on the attack.

As I mentioned, I published a Japanese language music and art magazine in tokyo. That means I had business interaction with record companies, distributors, retail buyers, etc. As I clearly said, there are some fields where folks may need to express themselves in keigo as a Japanese person would instead of expressing themselves as they normally would ( but in Japanese). But clearly most gaijin do not inhabit those realms.

I stand by my off the cuff comments about Japanese views of gaijin, and from years here, you should realize I am hardly alone in them. The existence of these japanese attitudes is pretty much the reason this website is called fuckedgaijin.

[maraboutslim]

by the way, what I mean by giving benefit of doubt is highlight the sentence where I said I CAN think of situations where people would need keigo, instead of selectively picking the following sentence to(and ignoring its own offer of "not many" and instead reading it as a hardline statement it isn't) to help you make your argument against me. By missing that first part, you are choosing to ignore the parts of my posts that soften them-- those are the maybes and perhapses that I was talking about.

[Greji]

or not blowing snot rockets into public sinks in the states?

Ahh, you're not supposed to do that?

[Buraku]

Most Business letters are for dregs

You and your product should be able to sell yourself without that kind of groveling

If its something you can not avoid then get your secretary to do it