I love English and was once good enough to become an English teacher at a Japanese junior high school. But that was in the past, and since then my English skills have been declining rapidly. So, as part of my language learning, I decided to post some simple questions and comments about the English language that are not easy for me (and that I should ask on HiNative or Quora) on Newgrounds. I am not an expert in English and may make elementary mistakes, but thank you for your patience.
Stop It | English Is Not So Easy 19
Japanese is an "agglutinative" language. In short, this language changes the nuance of a verb by adding different morphemes after it. The best example of this is in the imperative. There is a verb "yameru" which means "to stop" in Japanese. The imperative form is "yamero" which means "stop it!" and is made up of the stem "yame" and the suffix "ro" to make it imperative. Interestingly, you can tell who is speaking in which situation by the difference in the suffix that makes it imperative.
yamero, yameroyo, yameroya, yamerotte; Used by men/boys. yamero is the easiest and most aggressive way. yameroyo is used between friends. yameroya is used as a joke by western Japanese toddlers. yamerotte is also used as a joke when your friend keeps annoying you.
yamete, yameteyo, yametetteba; Used by women/girls. yamete is the simplest style and is used between friends and family. yameteyo is mostly used in more serious situations. yametetteba is used when someone keeps annoying you.
yametekudasai; Used in doujinshi. No need to explain.
Japanese people can roughly guess the situation by reading or listening to the one expression. Then I thought there must be a similar phenomenon in English, but I cannot find so many references. On rare occasions, some native speakers tell me something like, "This language is only spoken by women," but it is very rare. But this is what I want to know the most.
Since I cannot find such reliable examples, I first wrote as many variations of "stop it" as I could.
Stop it!
The most basic way. I have heard both men and women use this phrase. This is a simple imperative form, so I understand it to be the phrase I should not use.
You stop it!
I learned that adding "you" to the beginning of a sentence makes the sentence sound more offensive. In the Disney movie Zootopia, there is a scene where Juddy's neighbors keep saying, "You shut up," and I learned that this is very offensive language, If I hear this phrase in reality, maybe I should literally freeze there.
Stop it, please. / Please stop it.
I have learned that adding "please" to a sentence does not change the fact that it is an imperative tone and I should still avoid using this phrase. But I also feel that by adding "please" we can better express that we are really annoyed by someone's action.
Can/Could/Will/Would you stop it?
After some research, I found the polite way. But there are four grammatically equivalent ways. I cannot tell the difference, but I know there is a difference. There must be some clue to feel the nuance or the situation, like "Can you..." is used by XX when XX is XXing, but I could only get a little literature to evaluate it.
I found an interesting example. "Would you please stop!" seems to be a gentleman's way of saying he does not want to talk about something. This is a line from a novel. It does not seem impossible to statistically analyze its use in context and guess the usage of the phrase, but for non-native speakers it is very time-consuming, and no matter how hard I tried, there might be some uncertainty.
I learned another interesting thing. According to this (Japanese) website, there are three levels of "stop it: "Stop it!" → (keep annoying) → "Stop doing it!" → (keep annoying) → "Cut it out!" The last phrase was new to me, but perhaps this phrase contains the clue to guessing the situation. They introduced other phrases like "Quit it!" and "Knock it off!", but I gave up trying to distinguish them.
I found another interesting example in this video.
"Native, natural English that you can't learn in school 'Stop it!'" by Hapa 英会話
The English teacher, Sarah, said that "Oh, stop it!" is practically used by a woman who is being complimented by someone. So when we read or hear this expression, we can roughly guess the situation: A woman is being complimented by someone and she is embarrassed, but she doesn't really want him to stop. This is a specific and cultural example, but a good one. I learned another interesting use of "stop it."
Incidentally, I feel that only the phrase "Stop it!" covers a very wide range of situations. So I thought that especially in English, tone is also an important factor. For example, I learned many phrases that I should never use in everyday conversation, such as "I don't know," "I know, I know," and "No, thank you." However, every time I learned each phrase, my English teacher emphasized that it depends on how you say it.
"English that Japanese people tend to say but are actually rude" by Kevin's English Room
According to Kevin, these expressions are basically not polite, but if you say them in an appropriate tone, there is a possibility to sound polite: "I...(*thinking*) do-don't know.", "Oh, I 'know (stress)', I know!", "Um,...(*smile*) no,.. thank you." But, of course, there are rude expressions no matter how you say them, such as "You'd better...". Um, I'd better be careful.