#hard worker

So, did I mention the other day that I now have 50 followers? (I subtracted all the porn spam) I’m really grateful to you all for following me and continuing to be my silent motivation! As thanks, I’ll teach you about thanks!

Most people are aware of the ordinary way to thank people in Japanese: ありがとう and ありがとうございます. However, these are VERY GENERAL expressions of thanks. As it turns out, there are formal ways to tell someone you appreciate them, or at least their efforts.

First of all, let’s just talk about saying “to appreciate”. Like many verbs in Japanese, it’s easy to get distracted by the various nuances that exist in Japanese from just one English word. We’ll just focus on the closet to the English sense of “appreciate”. 

感謝 (かんしゃ) is a noun that means “thanks” or “gratitude”. When you combine it with します to becomes “to appreciate” or “to thank”. For example:

あみさんの手助けに感謝します。

Literally: I feel appreciation towards Ami’s help.

Meaning: Thank you for your help, Ami.

Another is:

みんなさんが来た事に感謝します。

Literally: I feel appreciation towards everyone for coming

Meaning: I appreciate you all coming.

Basically, the rule with 感謝します is that you’re feeling appreciation towards something, so you have to use に. That said, you can’t really use に with a verb, so you have to either use a noun form of it (“Thanks for lunch” instead of “Thanks for making lunch”) or just make the verb into a noun using 事 or の (“Thanks for the action of making lunch”). 

That’s a pretty standard and non-judgemental way to sincerely thank someone. However, there is also two phrases for gratitude you must know: お疲れ様 (おつかれさま) and ご苦労様 (ごくろうさま).

You would use お疲れ様 to your teachers, bosses, or senpais at work, thanking them for their efforts. It does not really translate nicely, but it pretty much conveying gratitude that the person is working hard, even if they get tired. It can also be used to dismiss someone from working, like you’re grateful for all they’ve done already. Simply, it also translates to “Thank you”, but it is only used in this context. To make it more polite you would add です to the end, and to make it more causal, you’d take off the 様. 

On the other hand, we have ご苦労様. There isn’t terribly much difference between ご苦労様 and お疲れ様. ご苦労様 is also used to appreciate someone’s efforts, but is used less frequently. Mainly because this is used towards people of a lower status who did something for you. In that case, ありがとうございます is fine as well. ご苦労様 translates closer to “hard worker”, but that IS NOT what the kanji mean separately. 苦労 alone translates to “troubles”.

And that’s it! みんさんがブログを読んだ事に感謝します！＾＿＾