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In English, a convention is to always say yourself last in a list of people:

> (1) **Mr. Tanaka** and **I** drank tea. // <--- natural  
>  (2) **I** and **Mr. Tanaka** drank tea. // <--- grammatically correct but
> _extremely_ unnatural

what about Japanese?

> (1) **田中さん** と **私** がお茶を飲んだ。  
>  (2) **私** と **田中さん** がお茶を飲んだ。

How does #2 sound?

I was instructed to form English lists this way out of deference to others.
Same idea as let guests sit-down first in a meeting, let guests begin eating
first if you are the host, etc. Yourself is always last.

Does Japanese have this convention with regard to lists of people? For the
same reason?
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-07-12T14:14:40.367
36610
2020-04-29T02:33:34.803
15778
question
politeness
Is there a convention to always place yourself last in a list of people?
Order is not really important in most cases. Sentence 1 and Sentence 2 sound
almost the same to my ears in the Japanese versions. BCCWJ Corpus has roughly
the same number of examples of `私とあなた` (43 hits) vs `あなたと私` (35 hits). And
"order in a list of people is important" is what I learned in _English_
classes at school :D

I vaguely feel that order can be important even in Japanese in the most formal
writings between companies, but could find nothing worth citing here. It was a
lot easier for me to find articles about how important the order is _in
English_. When I have to write something very formal in Japanese and want to
play it safe, perhaps I will follow "the English rule" even in Japanese, but I
don't know how important it really is.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2016-07-12T17:12:26.433
36611
2020-04-29T02:33:34.803
2020-04-29T02:33:34.803
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answer