In actual Japanese society, how often are second-person pronouns used?


My Japanese professor (I'm in first-year Japanese) advised us to primarily
avoid the use of second-person pronouns like あなた or 君 or おまえ throughout the
year, and essentially treated their utterance as something of a faux pas.
However, I've been exposed a lot of Japanese language media (primarily anime
and music) and their use therein seems to be pretty okay. I understand that
あなた is used by wives to refer to "their dear husband" or something, and that 君
and おまえ are ostensibly inappropriate (the latter considerably more so), but do
Japanese people in Japan actually pay attention to these distinctions? I'm
inclined to think that my professor advised against their use (as well as the
use of a slew of other words I attempted to use from my experience, including
俺、彼／彼女 and あいつ／あいつら) simply to avoid beginning our instruction with something
overly informal.

tl;dr version: Are second-person pronouns as societally ill-advised as my
professor would like to have me think? In what contexts (e.g., with friends,
with older family members, with colleagues, or with superiors) are their use
acceptable?




There are lots of second person pronouns in Japanese, and of course, there are
occasions where you are supposed to use them. I think the reason your teacher
advised you to avoid using them at the beginning is not because you are not
supposed to use them but because it will be difficult for a beginner to pick
up the right one. Rather than making a wild guess and picking the wrong one,
do not use them for the time being until you proceed to an advanced level and
become sure which one to use in which occasion. That was your teacher's
message, I guess.

For example, `あなた` has a very subtle nuance, and can only be used between
certain relations, contrary to what another answer says. If you use `あなた` to
your teacher, it would be definitely rude. But that does not mean that `あなた`
is an impolite form. It actually is an honorific form, and why it becomes
impolite has a complicated reason behind it. It is true that you often cannot
find a pronoun with the appropriate politeness, and have to call the second
person by the name or by the title. As I mentioned above, the rule behind this
is very complicated, and you probably will not get it at this point. So I
think it is a good idea to follow your teacher to avoid them, but that does
not mean that they are not used in real Japanese. They are just too difficult
for beginners to use.

Your question: "[D]o Japanese people in Japan actually pay attention to these
distinctions?" shows that you are optimistic about how much Japanese language
is sensitive to social relations. Japanese is one of the languages in the
world that reflects the social relation in various aspects of the language
most heavily. Yes, they do. More than the speakers of most other languages.

To show you how severe it is in Japanese to use the correct expression to
refer to a person, I will point out that, the distinction that you mention for
the second person is just the beginning, and when it gets to the third person,
it becomes even more complicated. You can either refer to a person by the name
like `山田`, which is not (particularly) polite, or put a polite affix or a
title after it like `山田さん` or `山田先生`, but which to use depends not only on the
relation between you and the person referred to, but also on who you are
talking to. Japanese adopts a system called _relative honorification_ (as
opposed to _absolute honorification_ used, for example, in Korean). If `山田` is
your boss with the title `部長` within a company, and you are talking with
someone within the company, you have to be polite enough to refer to him/her
as `(山田)部長` (even attaching the polite affix like `山田さん` is not polite enough,
and is rude). But when you are talking with some outsider, then you have to
say `山田`, and saying `山田さん` would be impolite to the outsider (and the
expression `山田` does not become impolite to `山田`).

