Phrases for Everyday Life Part One: Coming and Going in Japanese

Introduction

Welcome to your first cultural article! In these articles, we’ll introduce words and phrases, and give you their cultural context to help you remember and use them correctly!

First up, we’ll cover the phrases that you would say when you’re leaving for the day, and coming home, as well as what to say in reply to them! Chances are, some of these might be familiar if you’ve watched any Japanese TV…

“I’m leaving!” / “See ya!”

In Japan, it’s very common to tell anyone who might be home that you’re heading out somewhere: whether it’s to go to work, to take a walk, or to buy some delicious snacks. This might depend a bit on the person and their family, but you can reasonably expect most people to do so.

So, what is this magical “I’m leaving” phrase? Drum roll

Woah, that’s a lot of hiragana! Don’t worry if it takes you some time to read through it, you’ll be lightning fast soon enough.

Grammatically, what’s happening here is a combination of the verb “to go”, and the verb “to come”. So if we were to literally translate this phrase, it would be something like “I’m going out and coming back”. But there’s no need to worry about that if you find it overwhelming. You can simply think of this as a set phrase!

You might be surprised to know that いってきます can be used when you’re leaving from other places as well. For example, let’s say you’re at work, and you need to go to the bank and do some boring bank stuff. When you leave, you’d say:

Basically, you can use いってきます whenever you’re leaving from somewhere and you’re gonna come back! You can even say 「いってきます」 when no one is around to reply! Many people even say this to their pets before leaving for the day.

This is largely because いってきます sounds quite a bit more significant than just “I’m heading out” or “I’m off” in English. When you say いってきます, you’re showing that you care about the people you say it to, by expressing “I’m leaving now, but I’m going to come back.”

Are you going to reply? Or just stand there like a lemon?

It's good manners to reply when someone says 「いってきます」. You can do so by saying:

Woah, again, that’s a lot of hiragana! And two doubled consonants?! Wowza. Just do your best and try and read it out loud a few times to get that muscle memory going.

When someone says 「いってらっしゃい」, it’s a bit more nuanced than simply saying “See you later,” or “Bye”. It shows that the speaker acknowledges the person who is leaving and wants them to come back safely. The literal translation of this phrase would be something like “go and come back”, but it feels much more like “Please have a nice time and come back safely.”

“Honey, I’m hooooooome!”

Going out is fun and all, but there’s nothing like coming home and flopping down on the couch. So now that we’ve covered the set phrases for leaving, let’s go over what to say when you come back!

When you come home, you can say:

Technically, 「ただいま」literally translates to “just now”, but this is really a contraction of “I’ve come home just now” (「ただいまかえりました」), and so we can safely equate it to “I’m home,” or “I’m back.”

The expected reply to this is:

Which is often shortened to just:

This phrase is technically just “Come home”, but it has a caring “welcome back” nuance to it. Be sure to say this in reply to ただいま, because otherwise, it sounds like you, well, don’t care.

It's worth noting that unlike 「いってきます」 and 「いってらっしゃい」, 「ただいま」 and 「おかえりなさい」 tend to only be used at home, and not in the workplace, etc. So try and keep this one with your friends and fam!

Overall, these phrases are a good example of how Japanese society takes its manners quite seriously. You should expect to say these whenever you’re coming, going, arriving home, or welcoming someone home if you want to seem like a well-put-together native speaker of Japanese!

If these phrases still seem difficult to pronounce and parse through, don’t sweat it! Reading and speaking Japanese smoothly takes time, and your journey has only just begun!

Summary

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  When you leave to go somewhere you should say 「いってきます」("I'm off!").

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  The expected reply to 「いってきます」is 「いってらっしゃい」 ("See you later!").

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  When you arrive home you should say 「ただいま」 ("I"m home").

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  The expected reply to 「ただいま」 is 「おかえりなさい」 or 「おかえり」 ("Welcome home").