Quote:
Originally Posted by lucagalbu
Why do you say that? My teacher is a native Japanese speaker and also the textbook uses じゃありません。 Both the teacher and the textbook say that in spoken language じゃありません。is more common than ではありません。
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Native Japanese teachers that teach abroad would almost never point out the "less than perfectly natural" phrases in the text. It would only make their job difficult because students like yourself would surely keep asking about them.
How about an observation of a native speaker that lives in Japan, not Italy, which is me? Since I'm not a teacher, I can be more honest about what really sounds natural in our ears.
I don't think I ever say じゃありません myself. I hope not because it doesn't sound good. Where I live, which is mid-town Tokyo, I hear it once in a while though I've never liked it. The phrase has got a terrible balance between the very casual-sounding じゃ and the non-casual ありません. That's just the kind of a phrase that educated people hate to see the most. It lacks the refinedness people expect. I'm pretty sure it would be corrected if a kid used it in a composition in Japan as well. I would surely correct it if my own kid used it.
This may not be the case in Kansai but I doubt you are being taught a dialect.