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?
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2011-12-21T20:02:19.017
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politeness spoken-language second-person-pronouns
In actual Japanese society, how often are second-person pronouns used?
I was given the same advice by my first-year professor, and I'm pretty sure
the reason why he told us that was to break our reliance on them. In English
(among other languages) it is necessary to always use second-person pronouns
from a grammar stand-point, and in Japanese they are in no way required, and
very often omitted. By telling us not to use them ever, he was getting us to
re-wire our brains. (Which is a good thing! Adding `あなたは`every time you want
to say "you" in Japanese is very unnatural!)

That being said, second-person pronouns are used with some regularity in
Japanese, but which one depends highly on who is speaking, and to whom they
are speaking. `お前`, `あんた`, and `きみ` are some of the more common ones.

Which brings me to my third point: if you are not absolutely sure that you
should be using a second-person pronoun, just don't. It will sound much more
natural, especially for a non-native speaker, you don't have to try to falter
trying to think of the right pronoun. You can use the person's name plus `さん`,
or `先輩{せんぱい}`, etc., (speaking in the third person in Japanese, even when
referring to yourself, is not as strange as it sounds in English), or if you
don't know their name, you can use, `お兄さん`, `お姉さん`, `おじさん`, `おばさん`, etc.,
depending on their age and gender (despite the fact that you're not actually
related to them). In a pinch, `あなた` will work for anyone, even if it's not
quite appropriate, you'll be understood.
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2011-12-21T20:34:04.427
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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`).
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2011-12-21T21:16:21.783
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I think you should follow your teacher's advice and avoid second person
pronouns. I speak Japanese daily, but _never_ use them.

But since they _do_ exist, I don't think "just don't use them" suffices, so
I'll try to give a list of situations when I hear them. But even in these
cases, they're used _much_ less than in English. Usually sentences are created
in a way where the second person's role is understood implicitly.

  1. _Between romantic partners/very close friends_. Some people (mostly males) sometimes address very close friends/romantic partners as お前, others (mostly females) sometimes as あなた. But even if you truly _are_ romantic partners/very close friends, many people will still not like this, while others will like it, taking it as a confirmation that you are, in fact, romantic partners/very close friends. 

  2. _Jocular use_. If your statement is very obviously jocular, you can sometimes sneak in an お前 (or おめぇ), 君 or あんた. But even so, do _not_ do it to somebody who is senior to you.

  3. _To someone very junior to you_. A senior at a workplace might address someone very junior to them as 君, and a school principal a student as 君 etc.

  4. _Broadcasting_. In broadcasting, the option of mentioning the addresee's name is often not available, so you will sometimes hear/see あなた/君, for example in commercials.

  5. _Dialectal use_. Some dialects use 2nd person pronouns more than standard Japanese. I do not have the knowledge to cover this in full.

  6. _Foreign movie/tv-show voice-overs_. This is where I hear it the most (mostly 君 and あなた). The lines using them still sound unnatural to my ears, but I guess I can understand why they need to translate them that way, since it's often hard to remove the 2nd person pronouns without changing the whole context.

This list is probably not complete, but these are the cases I could think of.
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