Is こんばんは too formal for everyday conversation?

Question

When giving a talk on Japanese, 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, a Japanese textbook for children of ages 10 to 15, and wiktionary.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.