Fun with Japanese – Advanced

When I first started working in Japan, I worried about how to request customers do something – without being rude. For example, let’s say I needed some images from them before I can continue working on their site. In English I might say something like:

I need you to upload the image so I can continue working on the site.

In Japanese, we could use くだいさい kudasai to ask them to upload the files, but that is too direct. Remember, in Japanese things are usually said in a fairly indirect manner.

First, we need to use honorific form of Japanese i.e. kei-go. The honorific of くださる kudasaru is いだたく　itadaku. The exact usage of いただく is out of the scope of this post, but briefly, it is used when you are trying to show respect to somebody above you. It pushes their level above you.

So if we want to be polite to our customer and request they do something, we could say:

私はサイトを進めるために、画像をアップして頂きますか？
わたし　は　さいと　を　すすめる　ために、　がぞう　を　あっぷ　して　いただきますか？
watashi ha saito wo susumeru tameni, gazou wo appu shite itadakimasuka?

This is valid Japanese, and is polite enough. We ask them if they could do something politely. But that’s not what we are going after. We are not asking them to upload an image, we are telling them to upload an image – politely of course. We can tell them to upload a file by saying something like this:

私はサイトを進めるために、画像をアップして頂ければと思います。
わたし　は　サイト　を　すすめる　ために、　がぞう　を　アップして　いただければ　と　おもいます。
watashi ha saito wo susumeru tameni, gazou wo appushite itadakereba to omoimasu.

The first part of the sentence is very straight forward.

私はサイトを進めるために、

Literally “So I can advance with the website”.

The second part is where the magic happens. 画像をアップして頂ければと思います。Literally the translation doesn’t make much sense. It’s something like, “I think if I could graciously receive the uploading of the image.”

You can use the 〜て頂ければと思います ~ていただければとおもいます　~te itadakereba to omoimasu to tell people do most anything.

To politely request that customers or anything “above” you do something, simply create a sentence of what you want them to do ending in a て-form verb followed by our kei-go verb いただくitadaku in ba-form, followed by the particle と and the verb 思います　おもいます　omoimasu.