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I was told a story where a male westerner learnt Japanese from his girlfriend
and ended up speaking more like a female. The storyteller thought this was
hilarious.

What important differences should I look for between male and female speech?
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2011-05-31T22:47:59.243
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2016-04-12T18:16:17.920
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pronunciation register gender particle-わ
What differences should I look out for between male vs female speech?
It's not so much pronunciation as it is word selection. This includes things
such as あたし vs. 僕, かしら vs. かな, わ vs. よ, and so on.
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2011-05-31T22:51:16.510
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There are almost too many to list, but the simple (grammatical) ones are:

  1. Men should never use わ at the end of a sentence in place of よ. If you're REALLY good at Japanese as a man, you can get away with わ only when you're saying something to yourself aloud, such as 疲れたわ in passing, right before you decide to leave work, et al.
  2. Women can end sentences with the nominalizer の (何しているの？). Men can informally (e.g. with their partners, family), but really should avoid it for the most part.
  3. Young men sometimes transform ない into ねー (it's a sound change, nothing grammatical - basically anything ending in "ai", such as "nai", "tai" can become "nee" or "tee"). I've never heard a woman do this.

Word selection is also important, but most dictionaries indicate this.
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2011-05-31T22:51:54.473
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2011-05-31T22:51:54.473
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There are a number of differences between masculine and feminine speech, but
here are some of the common markers of feminine speech:

  * Ending a question with の (instead of か or のか)
  * Using the sentence-ending particle わ (instead of よ)
  * Using the sentence-ending particle かしら (instead of かな)
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2011-05-31T22:53:14.020
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2011-05-31T22:53:14.020
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Probably too vast a question to cover exhaustively, but I can offer a couple
pointers picked from experience (mine and foreigners I've met):

  1. [First-person pronouns](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/first-person-pronoun) (kinda obvious, really). Beside straight-up pronouns, the use of your own name to address yourself is a big tell-tale of female speech (some older grandpas can get away with it, but I doubt that applies to you).

  2. Sentence endings: generally stay away from 「わ」 and 「かしら」. Conversely, there are some typical male sentence endings, such as 「ぜ」,「ぞ」, 「い」(as in 「だい」,「かい」)...

  3. Some very connoted colloquial expressions (ちょー etc.), which are sometimes acceptable by teenage boys as well as girls, but will mostly make you sound like a teenage girl if you use them as a grown man.

  4. Gender-infused grammar forms (especially for questions/rhetorical questions): is an incredibly complex and vast topic, with a fair bit of subjective thrown in, but I have often heard that the over-use of "soft" forms (such as 「〜のです」, 「〜です？」) or even the over-use of full verbal forms (when they can be omitted) tends to make you sound effeminate.

Overall, I'd say: pay attention to points 1~3 above and don't worry too much
about 4 until you reach a fairly advanced level.

**Edit:** on a more general note, it is worth pointing that, if guy-foreigners
using feminine speech is the most common side of this (by virtue of the male-
to-female ratio being high in this category), the opposite (women learning
from native men and using male speech patterns) also exists and is not any
less derided. In fact, unfair as it is, Japanese (esp. of the opposite sex)
will tend to be a lot more accepting of foreign-men-that-speak-like-women than
the converse.
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2011-06-13T07:44:40.473
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2011-06-13T07:51:53.333
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