Here’s Dot Wordsworth on politeness across languages:

English-speakers are keen to say please politely in other languages, even if those languages do not express politeness by constantly saying please. So English tourists say ‘por favor’ to waiters and barmen in a way that sounds too insistent to a Spaniard. It is as if someone were to say: ‘A glass of wine, if you please, my good man.’ If you want the butter passed in Spanish, you say, ‘Pass the butter.’ To add por favor can smack of impatience.

I think she’s specifically referring to Iberian Spanish and not American. There’s a lot more to translating than just the lexical meanings of the words. I may know how to say please in Spanish, but its another thing to know how to use it.  The only real way to get this is to experience natives speaking the way they would normally.  Please might be polite in Mexico, but pushy in Spain.

This reminded me of one Chinese restaurant where I eat frequently.  All of the waiters say “please” at strange times.  They say things like “here your dumplings, please” and “okay, please” when they’re done taking your order.  I can’t even begin to imagine why this is, but I’ve rarely heard any other foreigners use “please” this way outside of that one restaurant.  I’m not sure what their native language is.

What about “you’re welcome?”  Say you’re tutoring a foreign student in English.  What would you say is the response for “thank you?”  You might tell them to always say “you’re welcome,” but how often do you actually say that?  In many casual transactions, you’d say “no problem.”  How often do you say “can I get” instead of “may I please have?”  When I’m helping people with English, I often find myself thinking of these textbook ways to speak rather than the way I actually talk in real life.

There’s a lot of nuances in language acquisition.  Its sooo much more than just word meanings and grammar rules.  Like they say at Motivated Grammar, “language is not a logical system.”

A quck addendum under the fold:

Saw this today on Language Log:

I have no idea why make up the bed and make the bed are basically equivalent but make up the room and make the room are not. Not everything about English syntax and semantics is regular and logically explicable. Some of it is as messy and lawless and unpredictable as Athens traffic or Dirty Harry’s policing methods.