On Japanese Honorific

We Japanese learners may mostly have heard about something such as: "learning English is as the process of coming in with tears and getting out with smile; while learning Japanese getting out with tears and coming in with smile." It means that when you first start to learn Japanese, it is easy, but as you learning deepens, it will become more and more difficult. One of the reasons that matters is an honorific which is more complicated in Japanese than in Chinese. This complex and difficult honorific phenomenon expresses Japanese thoughts, feelings, viewpoints, communicating methods and ethics ideas. As an essential ability of Japanese member, it is very necessary in the Japanese communication.Materials from abroad are hard to come into statistics closely as conditions limited. So this paper takes nowadays Japanese honorific research materials in China as examples for discussion. There are few books which specially explain the Japanese honorific in China; meanwhile, 50 papers in magazines have discussed the Japanese honorific since 1979. Most of these books and papers only introduce its system, current usage condition and research situation. Few essays concern its formation, history and the future. What's more, few essays submit the brand-new opinions and talk about the use of a third person honorific. However, as far as the categories and development of Japanese honorific, there are various opinions in China. Especially when regarding future development of Japanese honorific, there are even opinions contradictory in content co-existing.This paper has put forward the author's opinions on the basis of an all-around induction and analyzes of various classification methods of Japanese honorific. Also on the usage discipline of the third person honorific, this paper has made an all-round induction and research on the following four related aspects: (1) the relationship between the third person and the speaker, (2) the relationship between third person and the listener, (3) no relationship between the third person and the speaker and the listener, (4) the relationship between both the speaker and the listener. In addition, the author of this paper puts forward her own relatively special understandings on the future development of Japanese honorific on the basis of collection and manipulation of plentiful materials.This paper explains the Japanese honorific from the following six aspects. 1 Origination and development of the Japanese honorific: (1)what the Japanese honorific is; (2)the generation and development of the Japanese honorific; (3)the objects of the Japanese...