What is 'to please' in Japanese?

Answer 1

喜ぶ (yorokobu) is the Japanese word for "to be delighted/pleased", and to say that this state was invoked upon someone else, you need to use the causative verb tense. Thus to say "x made y to be pleased", you could say XさんはYさんを喜ばせる (x-san ha y-san wo yorokobaseru). You could also use 満足 (manzoku), which means "satisfaction" with the generic "to do" verb する (suru). In this case, you would still need to use the causative tense, which for する is させる (saseru). Using this, you could say XさんはYさんを満足させる (x-san ha y-san wo manzoku saseru).

But perhaps, this is a bit too direct, causative verb tense usually has a "forcefulness" about it that I do not think is the intention of this particular verb. In this case, we can use the te form of the verb with 上げる (ageru) which would indicate that you are doing something for someone else as a favor. Using this we construct the two statements 満足して上げる (manzoku shite ageru) and 喜んで上げる (yorokonde ageru). With these, we would also no longer use the verb's object particle, but instead we would use the destination marker (because it's like the destination of a gift). This gives us the statements XさんはYさんに満足して上げる (x-san ha y-san ni manzoku shite ageru) and XさんはYさんに喜んで上げる (x-san ha y-san ni yorokonde morau), which would be like saying "x san gives satisfaction to y-san".