I’ve picked up on a bit of Japanese, partly from watching anime and partly from reading internet tutorials. I have a couple of questions about the phrase, “Aishiteiru,” meaning, “I love you.” First of all, and this has been bothering me for a while now, they seem to use the present progressive tense (or whatever the Japanese equivelant is), indicating something currently happening. Now I can think of some examples where it would make sense to me to use progressive tense in another language while we don’t in English, but this is not one of them. This seems to me to indicate that the love is a momentary thing that could easily halt in a short time, like saying, “I love you as of the moment.” If you put it that way in English, you would probably not get a happy response. So why do the Japanese say it that way, and what would it mean if you said, “Aisuru”? Also, how would you respond to that with, “I love you too”?
IIRC, the present progressive tense and present tense in English are both rendered in Japanese with the present tense.
There’s also a difference between dictionary form and other forms of the verbs. That’s tied in with politeness levels/honorifics.
I’d think the usual response from a man to a woman would be Suki desu.
I think suki means “like” rather than love. After all, you use suki when talking about hobbies and favorite foods. As I understood it, suki means “like”, daisuki means “really like”/“love.” I think the proper response to “aishiteru” would be “me too” but I forget how to say it in Japanese. I am pretty sure “aisuru” means to love.
AFAIK (as someone who grew up with Japanese but not formally taught):
“Aishiteiru” would be a present-tense way of saying, “I love you,” but it’s a continuous sentiment. I would use that in the form “Aishiteiru yo” to let someone know that I’m in love with them (if they didn’t know, were doubting it, etc). So I guess it emphasizes that you feel it.
vs “Aishiteru,” which I believe is a less contextual way of saying “I love you.”
vs “Suki” which is “to like” - I understand this to vary widely depending on context. I’ve heard it used many times by people that want to express “I like you” to extremely different degrees. I guess it’s also more manly to tell a girl “Suki yo,” I like you. Kinda like saying “I love you” without actually saying it.
“Aisuru” (“Suru,” to do/be doing). I’ve heard this used to express falling in love “ai suru yo” (we are loving/falling in love), but it’s just a base form of the more common “Aishiteru,” which would be a conjugation.
Japanese has some verbs that represent states of being. For instance, “shiru” means I know but if someone asks you if you know something, you say “shiteiru”, which is literally “I am knowing” and actually means “I am in a state of knowing”. There’s a lot of other common examples (some of which are surprising to English speakers) but I can’t think of another one right this minute.
I guess I should point out that to make a gerund (the -ing form) of any verb, you add “iru” to the “-te” form of the verb/ For the above example, “shiru” goes to it’s “-te” form, “shite” and adds “iru” for “shiteiru”.
Another way to make a verb, is to take a noun and add “suru”, the verb “to do”. That’s basically what “aishiteiru” is: “ai” means love and the “-te” form of “suru” is (coincidentally) “shite” (“suru” is one of the very few irregular Japanese verbs). Add “iru” and you get “aishiteiru” - in the state of being in love. And “ai” is different from “suki”, you wouldn’t use “ai” with your favorite dessert, it’s reserved for love between people.
The difference between “aishiteiru” and “aishiteru” is small. It’s very common in spoken Japanese to drop the “i” in “iru”. Kind of like “going to” and “gonna”. Means the exact same thing, just ones a little slangier.
“Ore mo,” perhaps? This sounds reasonable, but I wasn’t sure if it would be like saying, “I love you too,” or oddly, “I love myself too,” since you’re not restating the object.
It should be pointed out that anime usage is not necessarily a good barometer of how the language is actually used in real life. The Japanese people I know say that people almost never say “aishiteru”. Evidently it’s just too, too much or something.
Cross out ‘necessarily’ and replace it with ‘almost never’.
Aishiteru is pretty much NEVER used as an “I love you” phrase.
The word “ai” is used for all-encompassing love such as the love of God or life, or your kids (but you would not really even say it to your kids directly.) I think people don’t want to risk saying they feel so much when they might have to let their loved one down over something one day.
I remember about 15 years ago I was struggling with this and asked my Japanese teacher what he said to his wife, then? He went bright red and muttered “suki desu” and I just about fell over with shock, saying, "SUKI??? Suki??? You Suki ice cream! Why would you only Suki your wife???, " while he got redder and redder. Looking back on that, poor guy!
Oddly enough if you add “ai” to other words, it weakens it immensely and those words are used all the time - “aiken” is your beloved pet dog, “aijou” is a feeling of love towards someone and is used a lot (I guess you can say, “I have a feeling of love towards you” rather than “I love you in a godlike, protective, nothing will ever go bad for you again and I will always do my utmost for you way”!)
I have just called my husband over and asked his opinion about this. He says that aishiteru is formal and tends to be used to describe a situation rather than used directly to address the person loved. So you might in your wedding speech refer to the wife you love, or someone might write an article about you and the love you have as a couple but you aren’t going to say it to someone directly. My husband says actually it would feel rather cold and analytical if you did say it directly to someone in a non formal setting. (Formal being like a wedding ceremony during the vows.)
For what it’s worth he has NEVER said it to me in 15 years together. He has, come to think about it, never said “Suki desu” either. Asking him about this as I type he said it’s because to him, “I love you” in English is more appropriate. But pressing him, he’s giggling and can’t tell me why.
Excuse me, suddenly other things to do…
Interesting. I’ve heard the phrase, “Suki desu,” in animes as well, but I came upon the idea that it was used when someone has a newfound infatuation with someone else, like a middle school girl saying, “I LIKE like you.” Sometimes these ideas pop into my head from nowhere and I start to think they’re true.
So to restate my second question, how would you respond to, “Suki desu”? The Japanese syntax has me baffled on this one, especially in the case of “suki desu”.
The main reason I’d heard for “aishiteru” not being used is that it’s simply too direct, something you don’t really see in Japanese. :>
I’d have to agree with those who say that “aishiteiru” is too direct. Japanese are rarely/never verballydirect about emotions, and the more personal and intense the emotions, the more indirect any verbal expression of them will probably be.
Non-verbal communications about personal emotions, however, can be very intense. Looks, silences, intonations, and actions often speak much louder than words.
After 20 years in relationships with three Japanese men (serially, I mean), I’m used to it, and actually rather prefer it to the sometimes too-glib protestations of love that sometimes come out of American mouths.
By the way, another expression I have heard is “An’ta no koto (ga) suki desu” which literally means “I like/love the things you do” but seems to be used as a little stronger (?? not entirely sure of this) expression that just “suki desu”. Other viewpoints on this expression are solicited.
Roddy
The Turkish present progressive tense pretty much corresponds to the English present progressive, but there are some uses of it we don’t have. The example that comes to mind is the same as in the OP.
To say “I love you,” the Turks don’t say *Seni severim. That’s the present habitual tense, used for stuff like getting up and going to work every day. Maybe it’s felt to be too mundane for the urgency of love, like I’m cryin out forpassion with you babe RIGHT THIS MOMENT!
So they say Seni seviyorum, literally ‘I’m loving you (right now)’. Maybe for a sense of immediacy?
One Turkish verb tense uses -miş- to convey inference or indirect report: Seni sevmişim ‘It has been rumored that I love you’.
“Suki desu” is going to be the phrase you want to use 99% of the time, but let me see if I can’t work up some kind of explanation for both phrases. (I’m a native speaker of both English and Japanese, and my job requires me to have good textbook knowledge of classical Japanese, so this’ll hopefully be at least partially lucid. ^^)
First off, I’m going to lie and tell you that there isn’t a word in english that precisely captures the meanings of ‘suki desu’ and ‘aishiteiru’. This isn’t entirely accurate, but it’s important to try and parse the meanings of both outside of the english context.
Now as many of you may know, Japanese is a highly contextual language: though it’s possible to say things quite directly you very rarely do, as that’d be considered horribly impolite. As such you end up finding clever (or not so clever) ways to talk around the subject. Since said clever ways are pretty standard, people have taken to automatically interpreting certain phrases as codes, reading one thing into another. As far back as the eleventh and twelth century Japanese texts had already taken to being quite coy when talking about emotion, often saying “I love you” with the phrase “Koroshi fukashi,” approximately meaning something like “My thoughts (and by extension, presumably my feelings) are deep (and, judging by context, they’re probably deep because I love you so much)”. Fast forward to modern Japan.
The vast majority of modern individuals or couples use “Suki desu” or variants thereof, the term having become an idiom for both “I have (presumably good) feelings for you/I’m attracted to you” and “I love you”, depending on context. Hence if a girl who you hardly knew said “Suki desu,” you’d interpret that to mean “I have a crush on you,” whereas if your lover of forty years said the same thing you’d probably be safe interpreting it to mean “I love you.”
The problem with “aishiteiru” is that it carries a much more final tone to it; as has been mentioned before -te + iru = present/future progressive, and as such the connotation is actually something quite like “I’m loving you right now (and I’ll continue to do so forever).”
Hope that helps a bit… it’s really hard to explain one language in the context of another, so your best bet is just practice; the more you study and use Japanese (or any other language) the more your intuitive understanding of the grammar tends to increase, until you eventually stop translating between your native language and the new language and begin to develop a true metalinguistic lexicon for the new language.
(also as a point of interest, when emperor Akihito proposed to Michiko Shoda in 1959 the actual phrase he used was “Kininateiru,” literally “I’m perhaps growing accustomed/used to you.”)
The phrase for “he’s dead” differs between English and Japanese in a similar way.
“sono hito ga shindeiru” which would translate literally as “he’s being dead,” to which one could add a python-esque “he might get better.”
I forgot to say that my above mentioned Japanese teacher then said he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d even said “Suki desu” to his wife.
And if my six and nine year old boys, who watch a lot of anime, want to totally squick each other out, one sidles up to the other, cocks his head on one side, eyelashes batting, and squeaks out, anime-girly style, “Aishiteru wa!” Whereupon the victim collapses, writhing and making loud vomiting noises.
More on how the present progressive is used by other languages:
An instructive example of the difference between the aorist and the present is seen in this cynical remark on traffic hazards in Turkey: başka memleketlerde kazara ölürler; biz kazara yaşıyoruz ‘in other countries they die by accident; we live by accident’. The force of the aorist ölürler is ‘I cannot say confidently that anyone abroad is in fact dying at this precise instant, but I am aware that people abroad are likely to die—kazara—as the result of accident’. The present yaşıyoruz means ‘we are in fact living at this moment but—kazara—it’s more by luck than judgement’.
—G.L. Lewis, Turkish Grammar, p. 118.
Why am I discussing Turkish in a Japanese thread? The two languages share a very similar syntactical structure and treatment of verbs. Some verbal features in Turkish and Japanese, like the use of gerundive forms and perhaps the distinction between habitual and progressive presents, are so similar in both languages that one can almost be directly mapped onto the other.
Lewis also confirmed my guess in this thread about why the present progressive would be used for “I love you” instead of the present habitual (which he calls the “aorist,” i.e. a verb tense unbounded by time):
yazarım and yazıyorum may both be translated ‘I write’. But more specifically: yazarım ‘I am a writer; in principle I write (though I may not yet have put pen to paper)’. yazıyorum 'I am writing now; ‘as a matter of fact I do write’; ‘I write for four hours every morning’—her sabah dört saat yazıyorum—where the broad yazarım would be incongruous with the precise expression of time. For ‘I love you’ the Turk says seni seviyorum; if he said, seni severim that would sound far too vague and without immediacy, corresponding rather to ‘I like you’.
(Lewis, p. 117)
Another example he gives is yaparım ‘I am a doer’ vs. yapıyorum ‘I have the job in hand’. So the progressive tense in Turkish implies that a person is directly engaged with the action. That’s why it’s needed for love. Love means the heart is fully engaged, warm-bloodedly, not distant or abstract.
Incidentally, modern Indo-Aryan languages have on their own developed an agglutinative syntax that resembles the Altaic sort. I don’t think this is the result of Turkic invasions of India in the 11th century. It’s part of a natural and universal cycle in language evolution. After a synthetic grammar breaks apart into isolating pieces, they start to stick together with agglutination, and eventually fuse back into synthetic. Rinse and repeat…
Do you think this distinction between habitual and progressive present in Turkish is comparable to Japanese suru and shiteru too? (And what about shimasu?)
I know of using various forms of ‘shinu’ to refer to death, but I believe this is also one of those things that you aren’t supposed to speak directly of? I think there’s another way to refer to someone who has died, which is more akin to “passed on” or something like that.
Yes, most people when referring to their loved ones will say “Naku narimashita” which really means “they have ceased to be” The more I think about this, the more I wonder if the Monty Python team had a Japanese learner in their ranks…
This isn’t a linguistics thread so I don’t wanna get wrapped up in this, but it is worthy to note that, though there are quite a few correspondances in surface structure between Japanese and Turkish, there are also a good deal of contrasting features. For example if we look at postposing phenomena in both languages we’ll discover that postposing in Turkish is derived by rightward scrambling but does not involve rightward adjunction, whereas Japanese postposing simply cannot be derived by rightward scrambling.
I think Johanna’s yaparım vs. yapıyorum example is really cool, but my intuition for Japanese is trying to convince me that it’s a bit simpler; though there’re hordes and hordes of undertones in most Japanese phrases, as befits a highly contextual language, the basic distinction is simply a matter of timeframe; if you’re doing something the precise moment you mention it (or will do so in the future) you use suru/shimasu. If you’ll be doing it for a period of time that will terminate in the future, but not before you finish talking, you use ‘shiteiru’/‘shiteimasu’.
Out of curiosity Johanna, are you a linguist or a well-educated enthusiast? 