[Soft Jazz Music Playing]
Today, we’re gonna round out our trio of expressions that talk about giving and receiving. This trio consists of てやる, …(which we covered back in episode eleven as the more polite てあげる (as per Dazai’s usage), てくれる (which we covered in episode 13…, and now… rounding out the group: てもらう. And…, just so you’re aware…, in Japanese, you might hear these expressions labeled as either 授受表現 or 受給表現 expressions.

Okay. So, first things first. As a trio, let’s address what’s common among these expressions:

The one thing each expression shares is this idea of the doer of action doing something (or expending some physical or mental effort)… for some… “OTHER.” It could be some other person… or some other thing…, but for the sake of simplicity let’s just call this person or thing, simply: OTHER… …in BIG capital letters—OTHER. The action undertaken by the doer can, of course, be advantageous…, or…, disadvantageous to this OTHER. But most times, though, it’ll be a welcome action. And, for this reason…, we’ll assume in the language throughout this lesson that the intended desire of any action by the doer is, in fact, aimed at being benevolent—that the doer means to lend benefit to this OTHER. It’ll just keep things simpler as we go through our explanations.

Okay. So, what we want to do for you in this lesson is help you decide with relative ease which of these three expressions to use… when. In English…, of course, the concept of giving and receiving is pretty darn straightforward, but in Japanese, as we all know, things are hardly as cut and dry. Right? But, it doesn’t have to be that darn tricky, really. So, let’s make things a little simpler.

If we have an understanding of:
—from whom the action originates…, and to whom the action is delivered…
—from whose perspective the speaker is speaking (the DOER or the OTHER)…
—AND who, or what, the subject of the sentence is…

…we’ll basically have the knowledge we’ll need in order to use the expression most appropriate for the situational context of any sentence.

So. Ready to clear away the fog?

First, let’s do a quick recap of the first two in our giving/receiving trio before moving onto てもらう. This way you can operate within some clear boundaries. It’ll help you chunk things together a bit.

Speaking of chunks, let’s put these three expressions into chunks, and call our first:

TEAM てやる.

In order of politeness we have:

てやる てあげる and…てさしあげる

Now.

Two sentences so we can see these expressions in the wild. And, let’s add some Wizard of Oz technicolor… yellow for our subject, and pink for our OTHER.

(Speaking Japanese)

In both sentences it’s plain to see the doer is doing these things FOR this… “OTHER” we keep talking about, right?

… for the grandfather in the first sentence, and for Murata in the second.

Now. What we might not tend to think about, is that with Japanese…, in sentences like these where this OTHER is receiving some sort of benefit, then the actions we’re referring to are, in essence, GIVEN to this OTHER. This tiny bit of over analysis will be kinda helpful when thinking about this giving/receiving trio, so it’ll help to keep it top of mind.

In these expressions, we’re… “giving an action” … the action is… GIVEN.

Alright. So let’s talk pictures. This little arrow we’re using here (and we’ll use this same visual formula by the way for each of these)…, this little arrow represents the execution of the action by the doer in the direction of the other … the receiver of the benefit (or…, inconvenience) that stems from the execution of that action.   So, that’s our movement… from the doer to our OTHER. Now, let’s dive into the details.

We talked about three things we need to know to decide which expression to use, right? One, in fact, was that idea of movement… which directions things are going. Our visual here has all the info you need.

So, in a てやる, てあげる, or てさしあげる sentence, all the points we need to address (the doer, the speaker’s stance, or perspective, and the subject) all fall on the left side of our visual:

Okay, so… left side… what am I really saying here?

Well, the doer is obviously doing the action…,
…the speaker is allied with that doer (or, taking their perspective)..
…and, the doer is the subject of the sentence.

Next up we have our second chunk, team てくれる.

Again, in order of politeness we have…
[Music and audio fades out to indicate the close of this episode]
[More at: maplopo.com]