Male vs female language - help
 

Hello,

I'm writing an essay about male and female language and since I don't have any native speakers of Japanese in my surroundings, I hope you could help me.
If you could answer these questions for me I would be very happy.
(Note: I only want answers from NATIVE speakers of Japanese.)

1. Gender
2. Age
3. Do you think that there is differences between how man and women speak?
   [a]If yes, what kind of differences and can you give an example?
   [b]Do you think this may cause problems when men and women interact with each other? How?

The examples can be written in either Japanese or English.

Best regards,
Anna

Before I do this, let me ask if you read Japanese. How do we give you actual examples for question # ?

Oops, forgot to write that >_<

I can read Japanese and examples can be made in either Japanese or English.

If you can read Japanese, how in the world do you not know the answer to your questions? There's a few fairly obvious differences in the way they speak that even first-year students learn!

I'm thinking of かな／かしら and あたし／ぼく first off the bat.

Since you said you already read Japanese, I'll take it that you're already familiar with textbookish, neutral (unisex) speech, which is mostly based on masculine speech. So I will concentrate on the feminine speech in my explanations.

1. Male
2. Same as Madonna
3. It's not a matter of what you think. It's a fact and an important one in Japanese culture.

[a] Sentence-enders (particles)：
Women may use わ, だわ, わよ, だわね, ですもの、のよ、かしら etc., none of which are used by heterosexual men.

Pronouns:
Women may use pronouns that aren't generally used by men, such as あたい、あたくし、うち、あたしたち、あんた, etc. Men use あんた as well, but women use it far more often.

Exclamations:
Women use many exclamations that men don't, such as あら,いやーん, やーん, うふふ, おほほ, きゃあ, etc.

Honorific お or ご:
Women generally use it more often than men do. お米、お仕事、お食事、お酢、お砂糖、お塩、お庭、お 車, etc.

There are many other differences, both subtle and not very subtle, but the ones above are the most noticeable.

[b] No, not at all. We are used to it since birth. Without this, Japanese will be a boring, colorless language.

I don't want to add to the confusion, but I think it is fair to say that in Kansai (Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and surrounding area) the line between women's and men's speech is more gray. There are certainly words that men don't use and women don't use, but things like sentence ender わ and using うち are unisex in Kansai, where that isn't true in Tokyo or some other parts in Japan.

As I wrote in my first post, this is an essay about male and female speech in Japanese. For this essay I need to do my own research and I need to know what YOU think about your own language, not what all the books says about it.

This is only half of my essay, I have send out the same questions to native speakers of English so I then can compare the result with the ones I get here.

But you asked a factual question, not an opinion question. This type of research would be as if you were writing an essay on particle physics and asked "Do you think atoms exist?" to physicists.

Edit: Aside from [b], of course.