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When giving a talk on Japanese, [How to talk like a
ge1sha](http://www.slideshare.net/agrimm/how-to-talk-like-a-ge1sha), I made a
terrible mistake: I invited someone who knew something about the language
along.

The only times he heckled me was when he reckoned the Japanese I was teaching
was too polite. (He also helped explain some concepts I was talking about)
While I was aware that the teineigo form of verbs (-です and -ます) were somewhat
on the polite side, he said that こんばんは wouldn't be heard in everyday
conversation, outside of work environments.

Is this the case? Would this indicate that most textbooks and phrasebooks tend
to err on the side of caution, i.e. politeness?

Books where I've seen こんばんは used include the Lonely Planet phrasebook
Japanese, Japanese for Busy People (3rd edition), and
[Mirai](http://www.cheng-tsui.com/store/products/mirai), a Japanese textbook
for children of ages 10 to 15, and wiktionary.
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word-choice politeness greetings
Is こんばんは too formal for everyday conversation?
Is that person a native Japanese? I think he's not. `こんばんは` is used in normal
conversation. By the way, there are several mistakes in your slide:

  * p2. `minna-san` → `minasan`
  * ibid. `minasan konnichiwa` is more natural than `konnichiwa minasan`
  * p3. `Biru` → `biiru`
  * p4. `Dozo` → `douzo`
  * p4. `Arrigato` → `arigatou`
  * p9. `biru no go-hon` → `go-hon no biiru`
  * p9. `puroguramaa no go-nin` → `go-nin no puroguramaa`
  * p9. `Five am` → `Five o'clock`
  * p19. `o-to-san` → `o-tou-san`

Some are about inconsistency of romanization. Others are obvious grammatical
mistakes.

**Edit** To answer Andrew's question. The construction Andrew mentioned is
called floating quantifier construction, and the noun `biiru` and the
quantifier `go-hon` do not come together as one unit (technically called a
_constituent_ ), but the quantifier here is something ike an adverb. That is
why the order is entirely different from the normal order within a noun
phrase. Floating quantifier is observed in various languages. In English, the
normal ordering will be:

> I ate all of them.

But when you have a floating quantifier, you get:

> I ate them all.

You get a completely different word order. A similar (not the same) thing is
happening in Japanese.
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That guy who said that こんばんは _isn't_ heard in everyday conversation is flat
out wrong. I really hate when people get up on their high horse about
Japanese, especially when they're wrong. Golden rule is, never "heckle"
someone over their foreign language ability, because yours will never be
perfect either. I've been at this for 11 years and have lived here for 4, and
I still learn stuff every single day, which is why I'm on here. People with
attitudes like that really annoy me. Don't let those idiots get to you.
(/rant)

Back to the question though, こんばんは IS polite, but it is totally NOT
"unacceptable," "unnatural," nor "incorrect." I say it sometimes with some of
my best friends when we meet up, and I've seen my fiancee (Japanese) use it
very recently, when we met up with some of her friends (also Japanese).

If it's been awhile, you can say （お）久しぶり as your greeting. If you're really
tight and it's super duper informal, you can say おす, which is probably closest
to something like "'sup" in English. But when you greet someone that doesn't
fall into one of those two categories, your best and safest bet is to actually
just go with こんばんは --- there's absolutely no chance of screwing up the
formality level of the relationship with that, and there's also no risk of
sounding unnatural or incorrect.
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