Quote:
Originally Posted by masaegu
1. In most elementary schools (like all of them), you are simply required to refer to yourself as ぼく if you are a boy and わたし if you are a girl in both writing and speaking in class. Outside of class, like during the breaks, many boys use おれ and the teachers usually pay little attention to it.
For the title of a writing, the first-person pronoun is very often a must. If you title your compo as 「趣味」, no native speaker would think it would be a discussion of your own hobbies. It would be a very strange composition title but one would expect a discussion of what hobbies are to human beings in general.
2. By 普通体, you mean the dictionary form, don't you? If so, no, we (kids or adults) do not use 普通体 nearly as often as Japanese-learners seem to think. It would sound too bloodless and indifferent. In poetry and article-type writing, we do use it. You will see lots of です/ます endings in compositions by elementary school kids because that is the first style of writing we learn in school, which is mostly why I have kept stating on JF that we do not perceive です/ます as being particularly polite even though we may call it "polite" in name.
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I was thinking someone might ask about こっぴどく from the last paragraph but no question is a good question.
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Understood. I think I've got a good handle on when to use 普通体 (yes, I meant plain form—in English we use "dictionary form" only to refer to the present tense of the plain form since it's the form found in the dictionary) in speaking. Writing? Not so much. I know in letter writing, you use ます form. In newspapers, 普通体. Wasn't sure about school composition assignments. Thanks for the lesson.
I guess I could ask a question about こっぴどい. Is it the type of word you should use in an essay for school, or does it sound slangy? My non-native ear thinks it's slangy because of the こっ at the beginning and it changes the ひ to a ぴ, resulting in a harsher, stronger sound like I've noticed nice Japanese writing likes to avoid. I mean by that higher level writing uses something like 〜に行き、〜 instead of 〜に行って、〜 and my theory is that better writers subconsciously avoid harder sounds (think T, K, P) as much as possible.
Oh, another example is the difference between やはり and やっぱり.