In professional or formal situations, Japanese use two contrasting types of formal language---honorific expressions and humble expressions. For example, if you go to a store, you can observe store clerks use honorific expressions to refer to the customer actions (outgroup) but switches to humble expressions to refer to their own actions (ingroup). We have seen many examples of honorific expressions in Lesson 21. We will now focus on humble expressions in this lesson.

Humble and extra-modest expressions V1ないで V2 ("V2 without V1-ing") Embedded questions within sentences NameというN Giving directions to go somewhere V-stem + やすい/にくい ("easy/difficult to V") 皿声茶止枚両無払心笑絶対痛最続 (15)