Posted by valzevul 1 day ago
As someone who's never tried learning Japanese, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the deep dive and am now less afraid to check out some more serious tutorials (though I wish everyone put as much effort into explaining the system behind something so often dismissed as "just memorise it").
If this was a similar post about programming, it would not get upvoted here because more people would recognise it for what it is: a “Monads are Like Burritos” post from a well-meaning but misguided beginner.
Personally, as a beginner/early intermediate learner, what I have found works is just to allow my brain to learn this over time by reading and understanding more an more sentences. I used Genki and am aware that it thought this badly. But it was in the 3rd chapter and by the time I reached the 6th chapter I had gotten an intuitive idea anyway (とている just sounded wrong and I couldn't explain why). And I wasn't doing much output anyway so it didn't matter that I maybe confused a couple of verb endings as I recited the 2nd writing exercise og the 5th chapter of my textbook.
I'm not saying that I wrote this article for everyone. I wrote it for me and people like me. Specifically, for people who appreciate the rigorous-and-ridiculous — like teaching from the linguistical perspective while using romaji.
It's the same approach that my "Just JavaScript" course uses — it's 100% by the spec, but I'm using unconventional metaphors (like "wires" for variables instead of "boxes"). I take pride in making rigorous explanations approachable by slicing the explanation differently.
This is not for everyone. But it's also not a reason to say this shouldn't be written.
My personal headcanon to verb conjugation is that you know them when you know them, the shorter the explanation the better, spend more time with examples then explanations, and maybe just learn one or two forms at a time. And when in trouble, find a conjugation chart (preferably at the back of your textbook; after the glossary). My main criticism of Genki was that they should have taught the short form first (before the -masu form; 食べない and 飲んだ before 食べません and 飲みました etc.).
This seems like a culture clash. In programming blogging, it is completely fine to write blog posts about the mental model that works for you (as long as it doesn't contradict evidence) and then maybe it works for somebody else. The idea that I need to first get an approval from a commission of Serious Teachers That Verified Which Approaches Work Well For Learners Statistically is laughable to me.
I write for myself and for people like me, period. I do not claim this is useful to anyone but a tiny group. This tiny group is who it's written for. I explicitly say in the article that I struggled and this is what got me unstuck. If it isn't helpful, just close the tab.
This make a lot of language learners (including my self) extremely vary and reactive of tutorials and explainers such as these. In the language learning space, tutorials belong as chapters in a good textbook, and explainers belong in dedicated sites written by teachers who have proven their worth with dozens of other explainers (e.g. https://www.tofugu.com/). The difference is that these are meant as part of a much much much longer journey.
[Aside]: Japanese is actually my 5th language and the first that is self taught and outside the language environment. I am also a self taught programmer. I have observed that learning Japanese is in a totally different league then any programming language. I am now two years into learning Japanese, and I can barely read a kids book, and no way can I hold a conversation. At this point in my programming journey I was already writing three programming languages fluently (JavaScript, Python, and R) and was learning the 4th and 5th at the same time (Rust and Julia).
[Re: “this is what got me unstuck”]: It is quite common in the language learning space to learn things intuitively by mere exposure. And sometimes a language learner will falsely attribute some (what appears to them as a) novel approach to what got them unstuck, but what really happened is that just engaging with the language reinforced old neural pathways and they just suddenly “got it”, the novel approach could have been anything, what mattered was the engagement, not the technique. This is also true in programming, but in language learning it is extremely common. Our brains are wired to learn natural languages, and given enough exposure to the language we will learn it.
> not so lucky and got a "ru" ending? check what vowel before the "ru". it it's one of -aru, -oru, -uru, then it's also a godan verb.
Wrong: 煽る (aoru) is ichidan: 煽った、煽りたい、煽らない、煽ろう、煽られる 。。。
I don't have a problem actually conjugating and don't have any tricks for it.
It comes with vocabulary. Once you have a vocabulary that contains enough verbs to hit all the cases, the rest just land in one of the cases by example.
If you know 泳ぐ (oyogu) very well, then even though you don't use 仰ぐ (aogu) very much, you just conjugate it intuitively like oyogu.
When you're speaking, there isn't enough time to go through a roster of rules.
For all that I'm not totally sold on this article's idea of "stems" and "suffixes", I think it does a good job of avoiding this pitfall and correctly explaining the groups.
An important aspect of vocabulary that informs you about verbs is knowing the nominal: the noun-like stem. Like when you consider 帰る, you know from your vocabulary that there is no noun-like word "kae" that is just written 帰. You know that "homecoming" is not "kae" but "kaeri", 帰り.
So from that alone you know instinctively which way it conjugates: らない、れない、りたい、った、って、ろう、。。。
And a big source of learning the stem is ... japanese polite speech with -masu.
This is how children absorb what the stems are: hearing all the verbs in -masu form.
For instance, I think that every single verb that ends in "-rimasu" in the polite form (other than just arimasu?) is a godan -ru word. Drop the masu and you have a -ri stem, which implies the word is -ru, and conjugates godan: -ranai, -renai, -ritai, -rō, -tta, -tte, ...
Not quite: https://jisho.org/search/%23words%20%23v1%20%3F*%E3%82%8A%E3...
None of these are ever other than ichidan? If we imagine a -riru verb that is godan, it would have to go to -ririmasu.
That sounds like something only a ditzy weather girl called Ririko would say, for a gag. :)
FWIF, the "#words #v5r ?*りる" search does come up two hits:
The first one is 手を借りる, which is a classification error; it is a compound verb that conjugates exactly like 借りる by itself.
The second one is a curiosity: ラリる -- to get high on drugs. Supposedly godan, so it does give us ラリります, etc.
Wikipedia page on it with some etymology/origin notes: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ラリる
Well, apologies to Ririko there!
A crutch can be cast away gradually.
Finnish has two verbs, ottaa "take" and ostaa "buy". As a n00b I confused them all the time. So I decided that the "s" in ostaa was a dollar sign, and I used that quickly in conversation to select the right verb. And as I got quicker at it, it became "intuitive". I threw down my crutch.
I'm learning Turkish right now for example, and the dative forms for me/you (bana/sana) perfectly fit the accusative conjugation pattern in my native Polish. So my mnemonic is explicitly "the opposite of what you feel it is".
If you are not in that target audience, the article is not that useful. If are starting to learn Japanese, you would not start by reading this article. And once you are past your first month of learning Japanese, you have internalized how this basic part of Japanese verb conjugation works and thus the article seems hyper focused a tiny part of learning Japanese. So it’s predictable that people would point out the limited scope of the article.
I think “Aeron Buchanan's Japanese Verb Chart” offers a more complete overview of Japanese verb conjugation in a more concise form. It expects you to know how to read hiragana, which is reasonable because it’s one of the first things you learn when studying Japanese.
That’s what motivated me to write about it, really. In language courses all of this is often spread out over weeks or months. I thought it would be fun to write something that you can read in one evening and map out almost the entire system. With no prerequisites.
I agree. I had plenty of strange abstractions and crutches when starting out learning Japanese, and starting in romaji was absolutely fine. While the post wouldn't benefit me now, starting out any useful mental shortcuts to producing Japanese would have been most welcome.
Did it work for them though? They apparently never got past the basics. So IMO it's more likely the opposite; they've distracted themselves from getting on with learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_conjugation#Verb_grou...
So you agree my explanation is correct (but unnecessarily longwinded and builds a strawman)? I’ll take that.
So in essence this article boils down to someone claiming that the usual explanation is confusing and then their own system turns out to be equivalent to the usual way it is explained.
And based off your comment here the reason behind doing this may be you extrapolating how you first learned it to how people usually learn it.
I skipped the handful of exceptions because they have no rules associated with them, you just have to memorize them. Yes, it would be 3 if I counted exceptions. I am aware that they exist; you can check their list at the end of my post.
>You claim that you are given arbitrary tables to memorize, but it's usually explained to foreigners that you replace the last romaji to i when conjugating the verb into -masu form.
I must have been unlucky. I don't remember what resource I was using but it was primarily teaching with a separate table per suffix. Maybe the pattern was called out but I missed it due to feeling overwhelmed with the tables.
>And based off your comment here the reason behind doing this may be you extrapolating how you first learned it to how people usually learn it.
That's fair — if most people don't stumble here because this is clearly explained, that's good, and it means I've overstated the "usually taught". I still find that I prefer the specific style of explanation where we consider the corresponding vowel a part of the suffix, like -(i)masu or -(a)nai, which is how some linguists view it. That is another part of the motivation for writing the article.
- u verbs / Group 1 verbs / 五段活用
- ru verbs / Group 2 verbs / 一段活用
- Irregular verbs / Group 3 verbs / 不規則動詞
>or do some books teach "the -suru verbs" as the third group (instead of "suru" being a single irregular verb that you can attach nouns to)?
In books for native speakers instead of having irregular verbs they have:
- サ行変格活用 which are the suru and noun + する verbs
- カ行変格活用 which are the kuru verbs.
> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as し on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi".
I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.
An equivalent phenomenon going the other way (at least for American English speakers) is clearly distinguishing また mata "again" and まだ mada "yet" - American English speakers tend to merge /t/ and /d/ in that kind of intervocalic position (think about pronouncing "latter" and "ladder" identically), and it takes deliberate effort to pronounce distinct /t/ and /d/ sounds there in Japanese, where the American English sound law that merges them does not apply.
I wasn't really going for kunreishiki, more ワープロ, aka "whatever is the least typing to make the desired characters appear".
I think typing in IME is how most people actually interact day-to-day with romaji, and I lex "si" and "shi" identically because the difference is usually not important.
> this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
Then the article includes an exercise that verifies the reader’s understanding.
I also included a note:
> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji, therefore it’s invalid.
It sounds like you're saying "si" are not valid characters in the Roman alphabet.
Nope. You correct yourself after, sure, but what I wrote is how it came across at the time when reading.
> Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji
No, that's not what "romaji" means. If you mean Hepburn, say Hepburn. And if you don't know the difference, that's a sign to learn more before presuming to teach others.
As for “correcting” myself, yes, I expect the reader invested in arguing online to also be able to follow more than a single paragraph of text. I think it’s fine that you stumbled there as that paragraph wasn’t for you. I don’t think I’ve hurt your understanding of Japanese this way.
The only people confused by that paragraph are people who already learned kana or correct pronunciation (or both). That paragraph isn’t for them.
It's not just a technicality. "i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji" is not just sloppy but outright misleading, as though "si" and "tu" were somehow not romaji.
> there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. […] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. […] i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
If you fix all the errors that are in the article, at best there is an argument buried here that Hepburn romanization should not be used to teach Japanese to English speakers—but I think that point is really my own argument that I’m making with the fragments of the article that make sense.
Romanization can be more consistent with Japanese phonetics or it can be more consistent with English phonetics, and the Hepburn romanization is more consistent with English phonetics, which is why it’s a good choice for English speakers that don’t know Japanese, but a bad choice for English speakers who are trying to learn Japanese.
You may argue with my choice, or maybe you can argue that referring to cells in Hiragana table solely by my chosen romanization is somehow bad, and I should instead be inconsistent and give the same mora two different romanizations within a single article. Is that what you’re suggesting?
Second: am I arguing that the choice of using Hepburn here is somehow bad? Yes, that’s correct. I think Hepburn is a bad choice here. A good choice is Nihon-shiki. JSL romanization is also fine.
I think I agree that Nihon-shiki and explaining it upfront would’ve made the article more elegant. One constraint I wanted to hit is that a person should be able to read this article with zero knowledge of Japanese, and walk away with being able to conjugate almost every verb to every suffix correctly. This is more of a challenge to myself as a writer than any practical need but hope it shed some light on the choices and the framing. I liked Hepburn because it’s closer to how it sounds. You can imagine I’m using IPA instead if you want.
> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible. Like, if I don’t understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together don’t produce the right Hepburn in the end?
YMMV indeed, but I think the lesson here is “this is why you don’t use Hepburn when you’re writing an article about Japanese verb conjugations”.
Hepburn does make sense for somebody with zero knowledge of Japanese but it just gets in the way when you are trying to explain how Japanese works. So lesson zero is “don’t rely on Hepburn” and IMO if you are interested in pronunciation and listening you should be using audio as your primary source.
I sympathise with your point about the benefits of Nihon-shiki romanization here. It might’ve been a better choice for this article.
> I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible
I think the reader would just read the next section where I use your argument to critique my own approach? And then make up their own mind whether it’s defensible to do something in the article, to raise pros/cons for why I did it, and then to keep on with the choice.
I wanted to illustrate this confusing point, and that’s how I chose to illustrate it. I think it’s confusing either way. I trust that a reader who actually wants to learn, and isn’t just being a pedant, would carry away the right set of conclusions, and would understand the isomorphism (again — see EDIT below) after those two sections.
> Like, if I don’t understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together don’t produce the right Hepburn in the end?
Yeah. So that’s a learning opportunity that kana row shifting doesn’t quite follow rules you might expect from many other languages. Maybe that’s a clunky way to introduce it. I personally like this framing. As I noted somewhere else, you could imagine that I’ve chosen IPA notation instead.
—
EDIT: Actually wait, Hepburn is not bijective for zu and ji. I haven’t thought about that. It’s not relevant to any of the conjugations so it doesn’t break the article, but that may be a good argument that it’s not worth the effort rescuing Hepburn.
Hiragana also has its problems, because the hiragana used before WWII corresponded with an ancient pronunciation of Japanese, from many centuries ago, which no longer matched the modern Japanese pronunciation.
After WWII, under the American occupation, there was a reform of the writing system, which replaced many kanji used before WWII and it also changed the spelling in hiragana of many words.
In general the modern hiragana spelling has been changed to match the modern pronunciation, but there are a few survivals of the older spelling that lead to inconsistencies.
As an example, the hiragana syllable now romanized as "ha" was pronounced for some time several centuries ago as "fa-" in initial syllables and as "-va-" in internal syllables. Then the pronunciation shifted to "ha-" in initial syllables and to "-wa-" in internal syllables. After WWII the "ha" hiragana character was replaced by the "wa" character in most internal syllables, to match the new pronunciation, except in the "-wa" postposed particle, where the "ha" hiragana character was retained, despite the pronunciation. The particle is now romanized as "wa", so going backwards to hiragana would produce the wrong hiragana character, another example of non-bijectivity, besides "zu" and "ji". Yet another non-bijectivity example is that the postposed particle normally romanized as "-o" actually uses the hiragana character "wo".
The changes in hiragana spelling after WWII are also responsible for the fact that many Japanese words reproduced in old books written in English, e.g. from the 19th century, appear quite different from how they are written today in the modern Hepburn romanization.
I think that’s a long wait; I don’t want to rely too heavily on analogies but it is like teaching somebody arithmetic roman numerals and then explaining in a parenthetical that there are other ways to do arithmetic (but not naming them). Maybe the reader can make up their own mind—but I don’t think the pros and cons are raised in the article, or if the are raised, I couldn’t find it.
I don’t want to pile on here but it sounds like you are, in this conversation, learning about why the different romanizations exist and what the pros and cons are. Or if you already knew, you are getting what they call an object lesson. (Like you noted—in Hepburn, ji and zu correspond to two different kana each.)
> As I noted somewhere else, you could imagine that I’ve chosen IPA notation instead.
This just resurfaces a similar problem with different symbols—if you put your IPA notation in slashes // you get phonemes, which will get you something mostly equivalent to Kunrei-shiki romanization. If you put your IPA in brackets [] then you get something sort of equivalent to Hepburn (in that it’s designed to show pronunciation). Both choices will on some level obscure a regular pattern that could be revealed with kana or romaji. Orthography is funny like that; in both Japanese and English it can show the origin of words even when the pronunciation changes.
I think the other lesson here is that students will mostly learn morphophonology intuitively by absorbing examples with some light explanations of the rules, and if you overexplain the rules you end up with too much “scaffolding” which gets in the way. Like when people use mnemonics or try to memorize kanji by thinking pictorially.
In general, I find your attitude a bit condescending. This is what I wrote about my choice:
> note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head
My main mistake seems to be meaning “[Hepburn] romaji” by writing “romaji”. I was obviously aware of other systems because that is what the sentence says but I thought it’s acceptable to refer to Hepburn as just “romaji” as a sort of the default one. Maybe that’s wrong.
Other than this terminology nit, I think I’ve made myself quite clear there. I genuinely don’t think it’s a big deal. Maybe I overestimate my readers’ intelligence but I don’t find this difficult to live with at all once you get it.
Roman numerals is a funny parallel but it doesn’t hold very well. The difficulty of using Hepburn is O(1) shortcut: for conjugation, you only have to “remember” three special cases and they’re always applied just-in-time. It’s just substitutions — and are arguably inherent phonetically. Arithmetic with Roman numerals requires many stacked adjustments where you have to match pairs of things. And lack of orders really screws with ability to do multiplication. This just isn’t an intellectually honest comparison.
Re: your last point I actually kind of agree. I’m that annoying student who likes to un-extrapolate backwards from examples to the rules, knowing which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, after which I can go back to examples. My article is for people like me. Maybe there’s a few more of them.
Yeah—I can understand why I’d come across as condescending. There’s a balance here—I want to be clear when I say that I have problems with the article, but I don’t want to be hurtful and I don’t want to make criticisms that are not supported by the text.
Rather than defend my comments as “correct” let’s say that I failed in my goals of not coming across as condescending. The reason I want to frame it this way is that similarly, I think the article failed in its goals as coming across (to me) as “look at this neat thing about Japanese”.
It is just kind of the nature of written communication that it takes a lot of editing and polish to make it clear, correct, and concise. I had the good fortune to sign up for Japanese 101 when my professor was in the middle of writing a new Japanese textbook—it was pretty exciting, with the changing lesson plans, the flock of master’s students hanging around, revisions and drafts to teaching materials, and those endless hours of classroom observation. The teachers occasionally gave us a “peek behind the curtain” and explained why they chose to teach things a certain way or another. I’ve rarely gotten that kind of explanation in any class that I’ve taken so I thought it was pretty special.
I don’t expect you to put in the textbook-level of polish into your article but there is a kind of verbosity (the article is long, which makes it kind of hard to respond to because there is just so much to sift through), there are some problems with clarity (the issue of romanization and orthography is mixed in with the conjugation, and maybe it would be better to separate those issues) some problems with correctness (various) and some problems with completeness (the patterns omit some conjugations that I think you don’t know, and I don’t think they follow the pattern).
I have certainly put effort into articles that have gotten brutal negative feedback; I think it was right for me to write the article, and then feel like shit from the feedback, and then maybe retract and revise it. If there is one actual error here, a true error, I think the error is fighting out criticism in the HN comments.
So, on verbosity: that’s a stylistic choice. Not for everyone. For romanization: point taken and I agree frontloading it would’ve been more elegant. Though I kind of don’t like that it sounds wrong for an unprepared speaker.
For correctness: please provide specific issues. I’ll try to fix them. This is the part I actually care about.
For completeness: yes, some things I put out of scope break the pattern (or rather extend it — the mechanism of concatenation is the same but it actually may be easier to hard-split it by godan/ichidan). I genuinely think that by the point you learn those, you don’t need the scaffolding anyway, and the model has done its job.
I don’t feel like shit from the feedback. This is not my first rodeo. Where I have correctness issues, I would like them pointed out so I can fix. The handwringing about it being a weird way to teach — not so much. I know it’s weird; I wrote it because that’s what worked for me.
And fighting out the criticism in HN comments is half of the fun, isn’t it? :)
Again, the conceit of the article is you can learn almost the entire conjugation system in a single evening with no prior knowledge of the language. I invite you to step back for a moment, to accept that conceit as valid, and then to judge the article based on that conceit. For a serious learner, think of it as a fever dream that helps the concepts click next time you see them “properly”. For a tinkerer, think of it as a spark that gets you curious about the language.
I assume no prerequisites at first. So my reader has never seen a kana table and doesn’t know which syllables exist.
I choose to teach conjugation first. That’s an unorthodox choice but I like it! That’s what I set out to do. So we get far enough until it breaks down. And it breaks down when a rule (which worked so far) doesn’t help with “s” because saying “si” would sound wrong.
That’s the moment I use to teach kana table and its importance. This “you made a mistake” is a pedagogical vehicle for introducing kana rows. And we go over the exact ones that you’d make a mistake with. So each special case is walked through.
At this point we could discard Hepburn but I choose to keep going because if you know special cases, there’s no issue. And at some point you’ll learn kana anyway.
So that’s how I chose to layer it. Maybe it’s a bit unholy but I like it. It is definitely self-consistent.
1. It relies on people not understanding certain things. In general, you cannot expect people to have exactly the right misunderstanding necessary for a lesson.
2. Spending extra time with Hepburn reinforces it, and it shouldn’t be reinforced.
I am in general extremely skeptical of lessons which try to engineer a way for the students to make mistakes. What I have seen in real classrooms and in informal teaching is that the mistakes are habit-forming and the outcomes of this kind of engineering are unpredictable.
Mistakes are appealing to the developers on HN because we understand things more by seeing them fail. But this does not mean that you can engineer somebody to experience the same moment of enlightenment that you did, because it requires constructing the same (incorrect) mental model that you had when you made that mistake that led to useful insight, and it both difficult and counterproductive to try and make that happen to students. Give people the best chances to learn by giving them the best chances to avoid mistakes, and the mistakes and insight will happen organically on their own, in unique ways for each student.
I also genuinely think it’s not that deep and that there’s no complex mistake being engineered here. I don’t believe you that the “mistake” of “sa with a replaced by i must be si” is an an unusual one for someone who hasn’t yet internalized kana. If we test this on random people on the street, I’m highly confident an overwhelming majority will make this exact mistake.
I agree with your broader point that “teaching via mistakes” is a risky path not worth it when the mistakes start getting combinatorial. I also think it’s absolutely fine when everyone does the same exact mistake, and there’s exactly one way to avoid it.
People off the street are obviously not learning Japanese verb conjugations in isolation. If they are learning it at all, they probably have some broader goals involving spoken or written fluency, and these people are gonna fire up DuoLingo or sign up for a class or something. Japanese verb conjugations are simple and easy to learn but they are usually not taught day 1, and you are not expected to learn the whole table at once, but one or two conjugations at a time along with practice using that conjugation.
So if the pitch is, “this system works for teaching English speakers off the street how to conjugate verbs in Japanese” it seems to me like the goal is a little artificial and maybe not representative.
I think the call to “engineering mindset” may be illuminative, because engineers are likely to have unwarranted confidence in fields outside of their expertise. Engineers in practice often think that they can use engineering skills (broadly speaking) to solve education problems, learn foreign languages, or solve social problems. The phenomenon is sometimes called “engineer’s disease” or “engineer’s syndrome”. What I wonder is whether there is something about engineering mindset that is counterproductive outside of engineering fields—this seems plausible, because it explains why we don’t just teach everyone to use an engineering mindset.
I never claimed it's representative of anything. I said this is the explanation I wish I (me, personally!) were given, and I wrote it for people like me. I appreciate unorthodox explanations as a genre. As long as they're rigorously correct (again, you're welcome to point out factual mistakes), I like experiments like "learn a non-trivial part of the language with no prerequisites as a syntactic transformation in one evening". For many languages, including my native language, this is literally impossible! But for Japanese, it works. Maybe that sort of explanation is not to your taste, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve being written. The rest of your comment reads kinda ad hominem.
From what I can tell, my engineering-brained explanation is consistent with how a linguist would explain it (aside from choices in presentation like romaji). That's good enough for me.
When I write “it’s not representative”, I am hoping to communicate an opinion and not hoping to refute a specific claim you made.
I appreciate unorthodox explanations, and I like to collect them—but sometimes the explanation just doesn’t “land” and in this case the explanation landed especially poorly for me, and I also identified some errors, like the claim that “si” is not in the kana, or that hanasimasu is incorrect—I know that you don’t accept my viewpoint that this is incorrect—sometimes it happens that explaining your point of view or reasoning in more detail doesn’t result in agreement.
What is certainly true about linguists is that they do not present explanations in ways that are consistent with each other—and sometimes not even self-consistent, but they are upfront about the tradeoffs (they present theories and acknowledge that the theories contain errors) and they decompose what they present into different topics like phonology and morphology.
I have read some linguistic texts on Japanese (not very well! It’s a difficult subject). What I saw is a lot of variation.
I think it’s fine that your explanation is good enough for you—that’s exactly what you expect when people make individual breakthroughs in understanding when learning a subject. Sometimes those breakthroughs do not translate well to other people or translate well to lessons and that is the main gist of what I am trying to articulate.
"Romaji" does not (in English) mean "romanisation", as most people who've studied Japanese to at least beginner level know.
> This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji
See how there's not actually a contradiction there?
If you’re nitpicking on this sentence:
> I thought it’s acceptable to refer to Hepburn as just “romaji”
I’ll expand it:
> I thought it’s acceptable to refer to Hepburn [-flavored romaji] as just “romaji”
I think it’s clear by context what I was saying.
A spoken language is described by decomposing the spoken words into phonemes, where phonemes are sounds that distinguish words, in the sense that replacing one phoneme in a word with another phoneme will produce a different word.
While ideally each phoneme should be recognized by a distinct pronunciation, in the majority of the languages of the world a phoneme does not have a single pronunciation, but it is pronounced in different ways, depending on the context.
It does not matter at all how one chooses to write a Japanese word, with hiragana or with one of the various methods of romanization. For any writing system, you must know the correspondence between phonemes and how they are written. For very few writing systems there is a one-to-one mapping between phonemes and letters.
The Hepburn romanization does not attempt to be a phonemic writing system, but it attempts to be close to a phonetic writing system from the point of view of an English speaker. The Kunrei-shiki romanization attempts to be closer to a phonemic writing system than to a phonetic writing system. I my opinion a phonemic writing system is superior to a phonetic writing system, but it appears that for most English speakers it has been too difficult to understand the difference between such writing systems, so the Japanese government eventually gave up and they switched to Hepburn, to please the less sharp-witted English-speaking visitors.
Japanese has an "s" phoneme, which happens to be pronounced differently before the vowel "i" than before the other vowels, and before "i" it is pronounced similarly to an English "sh".
In the same way, the Japanese phoneme "t" is pronounced before "i" similarly to an English "ch".
Once you know these two rules, and the few other rules about the other Japanese phonemes whose pronunciation depends on the context, like "n" becoming "m" before "b", there is no point in mentioning them again.
In your discussion about conjugation there is nothing exceptional about the variations in pronunciation that are reflected in the Hepburn Romanization. They are just the general rules of Japanese pronunciation, like for any other words.
So any discussion about these spelling variations is misplaced in the discussion about conjugation, where it occupies a space without contributing anything to the understanding of the conjugation rules.
Otherwise, I think that your article is fine.
I strongly suspect that if I were using Kunrei-shiki, there would be just as many comments here saying my article is wrong because “si” is pronounced closer to English “shi”, but my article makes it seem like it doesn’t — so this is why you should learn kana bla bla bla.
I assume my reader (1) has zero prerequisites and (2) wants words to sound correctly while seeing them the first time. Those are the constraints that motivated my approach. You could argue that it’s a strange set of constraints to pick when teaching but I wanted it to be fun.
Obsessing over romanization, something that a student ought to outgrow, is a sure fire way for a student to get overwhelmed by irrelevant details that discourage learning. The hard part is putting in the work, not learning less than a dozen exceptions.
> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
I think the choice is not a good one, whether it is deliberate or by accident, it is not a good choice either way. The main caveat to Hepburn is that it’s unsuitable for explaining how Japanese works and it’s unsuitable for learning Japanese—so before you start working on verb conjugations, you pick up kana or one of the romanizations which is more aligned with Japanese.
The idea that you “shouldn’t think in romaji” is really “you shouldn’t think in Hepburn”. This is an important distinction! Japanese has a relatively small inventory of phonemes, somewhere around 20 or 22 of them, and they map very neatly to the latin alphabet.
But the article doesn’t make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.
IMO, this is kind of like seeing an article about how monads are burritos. Thinking that a monad is a burrito does not help me understand monads.
Nomu -> noma-nai / nomi-masu / nome-ru / nomo-u
Miru -> mi-nai / mi-masu / mire-ru / miyo-u
The ichidan and godan verbs are not assigned different categories because existing scholars of Japanese are just bad at explaining how they work, and you can still understand them just fine in romaji. I put the hyphens above to mark a place where you could think that the verb ends and the common conjugation forms end, and you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the “tricks”—but some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out (are you familiar with miru -> miyou conjugation, or miru -> mirareru?)
> But the article doesn’t make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.
Not at all. I give it two sections and then we move on. It doesn’t affect literally anything else on the page. You just learn to shift rows and move on. To make what points?
> you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the “tricks”—but some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out
I’m not quite sure what you mean to say in this part. I do cover -[r]eba and -[y]ou in the final section (“one more thing”) which extends the model to clearly handle that disappearing consonant. I think -[r]eru fits in there the same way, just as -[r]u itself.
I think explaining it as mi + [y]ou = miyou, but nom_ + [y]ou = nomou is a clearer way to think about this. The rule is that the hole burns down the leading consonant (but takes the vowel).
Oh and I forgot, you have to actually learn how to listen, pronounce and speak them, not just learn a useless romanization mapping. I've heard way too many English speakers just say the romanization with English pronunciation. At that point their learning efforts turn into self sabotage.
In total that's definitively a month of effort, albeit spread out over the first year of learning.
I also drilled on a drag-n-drop kana table [1] in a few ways -- sometimes I'd start from the kana and try to figure out where they should go in the table, and sometimes I'd go along rows or columns in the table and try to find the kana that belong there. These two directions drill both recognition and recollection.
Proper pronunciation is a cross-cutting concern. As a whole, it's not something you can reasonably learn solely from kana, but the aspects that are relevant are not difficult to pick up. Every kana breaks into one (vowels and N) or two (the rest) phonemes, and for the most part, the way you pronounce those phonemes is consistent across rows and columns of the table (admitting exceptions like "shi" and "tsu"). If you are taught those basics, learning how to pronounce kana is not hard. Training your ear to "hear" distinctions among English allophones, and to distinguish pitch accent from the more familiar stress accent, is much harder, and really has to come from experience, not just kana.
[0]: https://realkana.com/hiragana, wow it's improved since I last used it
It takes two weeks to know know the existence of all the kana characters (including katakana), to memorize the sound of enough of them to read some words, and to write some of them.
After a month you should have easily memorized the sound of all of them (maybe a rare one like ム slips by occasionally), be able to write most of them, and be able to read (albeit slowly) anything written in kana.
In the Hepburn romanization system, which generally tries to be transparent to speakers of English or other European languages, し is romanized as _shi_, because this indicates to English speakers that the /s/ -> /ɕ/ sound change happens. In the Kunrei-siki romanization system, which tries to be more faithful to the distinctions made in the Japanese phonological system, し is romanized as _si_ to be consistent with the other possible syllables _sa_ _su_ _se_ _so_ that begin with the consonant /s/.
And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet is a sign that their command of Japanese isn't all that good yet.
I don’t understand where this misunderstanding about my article comes from. I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”. My article uses romaji so this is self-consistent. I am also mentioning that there is an alternative system that would romanize it as “si” but that’s not the one I’m using in my article.
That is exactly the problem. Japanese doesn't distinguish between 'shi' and 'si', so all you're really gaining by pointing that out is learning how to correctly romanize Japanese, in a single system. Instead of learning the language you're learning how to represent the language in a foreign way.
The rule 0 of learning a language is to get rid of the crutches as soon as possible. Use their native writing system (or if they're one of the latin alphabet users, use their pronunciation rule), learn words of the target language using said language, and learn how to formulate concepts with the language rather than translating it from what you already know. Crutches should only be used to get to this point and no more. If you do that, details like 'si' and 'shi' are not even worth mentioning. Romanization methods have their own goals, and rarely is it about facilitating language learning.
> this is actually completely intentional. some purists may dislike that, but [..] i think it provides a much clearer intuition for Japanese verb conjugation than writing it in hiragana.
You are that purist that I’m talking about. I get your argument. I just think it’s a non-issue in my chosen pedagogical approach to convey what I wanted to move on. People unaware of how romanization works will nod at it and move on. People aware of it will not have issue with it. People with opinions about proper way to teach the language are the ones that will get stuck on this.
The article is engineer-brained. It’s for people like me. It’s not for the people you’re teaching, assuming these strong opinions come from you being a teacher.
Dan, this is cool, and I can tell you enjoyed writing this up and thinking it through as you wrote. Don’t let the haters get you down.
I think you’d like Orbit (withorbit.com), a tool that got built out of some experimental learning work I think originally done at quantum.country — it’s intended as a sort of toolkit to help turn blog content into spaced repitition inline memorization tools.
Check it out! I think the post would benefit from something like this - it’s fun for most to play with seeing how they are understanding this, and you spend a lot of time trying to create a bit of interactive reading/thinking in the blog.
Keep writing, please, it’s good.
Any discussion of Japanese here brings out a lot of extremely defensive nerds. I don't know why this happens more with Japanese, but it sure seems to. I don't have a strong opinion on the post, and I tend to think that if you find something that works for you, when it comes to languages, you should go with it. Far be it from me to tell you that you're wrong for learning how you learn. But that said -- and as others have noted -- the explanation here is misleading, and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration. Japanese conjugation is extremely simple, and the author is missing some essential context that would make it all much clearer. For example:
> it's not entirely clear what nomu's stem is. is it nomu? but then, we define stem as the unchanging part — whereas the last vowel seems to alternate, like nomi or noma in some cases.
First, there is a clear stem (飲＊), but you just don't know that yet, because you haven't learned kanji [1]. The conjugation is extremely regular, and there's no reason to memorize a bunch of granular rules like this:
> む (mu) changes to み (mi) when adding ます（masu)
To wit: a godan verb [2] shifts from the "u" sound（う・く・す・つ・ぬ・む・る・ぶ・ぐ / u, ku, su, tsu, nu, mu, ru, bu, gu）to the "i" sound in the same column of the kana table（い・き・し・ち・に・み・り・び・ぎ） when conjugating to the formal (aka "teineigo" / aka "masu"）conjugation.
It's one rule. Then, for casual negative conjugations, you shift to the "a" sound in the same column (わ・か・さ・た・な・ま・ら・ば・が). Two rules. Formal past tense, and a bunch of other tenses derive trivially from these (e.g. わかるー＞わからないー＞わからなかった / "I understand", "I don't understand", "I didn't understand"）
That covers the conjugations the author cites in the piece, and a few others that he hasn't. However, for past tense or て form, the author's system will actually confuse you (IMO), because the you really do need to have an intuition for kana to know how the conjugations are going to play out. Namely the following rules:
る・う・つ becomes って or った (continual or past tense, respectively)
く becomes いて or いた
す becomes して or した
ぐ becomes いで or いだ
ぬ・む・ぶ becomes んで or んだ
For these, it's really, really, really helpful to just know kana, and how the sounds roll off the tongue. Because if you do, you quickly see that there's really no other way for the first three endings to work out, and require little/no memorization at all. The last rows are the exceptions that you have to learn. But again, it's what...7 rules in total? In the grand scheme of language learning, this is nothing -- and boy, let me tell you, if memorizing seven semi-arbitrary things is a burden for you, Japanese is not your language.
Anyway, the point is, I strongly encourage you to learn kana as quickly as possible, and then onto kanji forthwith. The sooner you do this, the sooner all will be made clear!
[1] I am using the royal "you" here. I don't know if the author knows kanji and don't care; I'm saying that if a regular person is at this stage of learning Japanese, they will not know many, if any, kanji.
[2] Just doing godan verbs here, because ichidan verbs are much simpler. The tricky part of ichidan verbs is knowing which ones they are, which, alas, you mainly just have to memorize. You can sorta-kinda infer that a verb with an "iru" or "eru" ending is ichidan -- it's always true that ichidan verbs end like that! -- but it's a necessary-not-sufficient condition, which, again, requires that you know the kanji to distinguish "without memorization."
Misleading means it leads to a wrong conclusion somewhere. Please demonstrate which wrong conclusion my article is leading to.
>and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration
There is no "dependence" on transliteration per se. I use it as a visual shortcut for moving along the kana row, as I show in the middle of the post using the table. For all the examples we're looking at, the relationship between the mora and the corresponding romaji version is bijective — so there is literally no difference except the notation. I wanted the article to be accessible to someone who's not fluent in kana (and in fact to someone with zero knowledge of Japanese), hence the choice of notation.
>First, there is a clear stem (飲＊), but you just don't know that yet, because you haven't learned kanji
What could kanji possibly have to do with this? We're discussing a thing rooted in phonetics. The verb stem often includes kana in addition to kanji (e.g. 食べ). There's nothing special here about kanji at all.
>To wit: a godan verb [2] shifts from the "u" sound [...] to the "i" sound in the same column of the kana table [...] Then, for casual negative conjugations, you shift to the "a" sound in the same column
Sure, and that's exactly what I'm describing in the article. Why do you need to pretend I'm describing something different? There's even a place in the article where we use the kana table for that. However, since I assume the reader might not want to constantly look at the kana table, I focus on the phonetic intuition. And the phonetic intuition is trivially explained with romaji, which is why I use them.
> What could kanji possibly have to do with this? We're discussing a thing rooted in phonetics.
Your system is using a limited model that explains some things, but doesn’t explain many others. You need the kanji to see the entire elephant.
Obviously linguistics are post hoc explanations of evolved phenomena and never precisely categorize everything, but there’s a more complete system here. It’s best to start learning it early, instead of relying on the crutch of romaji.
> The verb stem often includes kana in addition to kanji (e.g. 食べ). There's nothing special here about kanji at all.
The point was that there’s a clear stem. For godan verbs, the stem is nearly always the kanji. Sometimes, there are only kana (びびる), typically because the kanji is complex. A few times, there are auxiliary kana (e.g. 変わる). For a beginner, this is not important. You’re also mixing ichidan verbs (食べる) where this is the common case (kana from the i or e sounds), with godan verbs, where it is not. Understanding this fact, alone, almost eliminates the need to memorize which verbs are ichidan.
With relatively rare exceptions, the ichidan verb stem contains kana, and the godan verb does not. The major exception class to this for godan verbs is the ~まる intransitive verbs, where the ま/わ remains part of the stem (変わる、閉まる、泊まる、etc). Otherwise, it’s weird stuff like adjectives turned verbs or slang.
Just knowing this gives you a linguistic intuition for identifying and choosing intransitive verbs!
> However, since I assume the reader might not want to constantly look at the kana table,
They don’t need to. They just need to memorize the kana. People keep telling you this across this thread.
Learn the kana, and these conjugation rules become so trivial that you barely even need to “memorize” anything.
> I focus on the phonetic intuition. And the phonetic intuition is trivially explained with romaji, which is why I use them.
Phonetic intuition is good. Doing it via romaji is fine for absolute beginners, but rapidly becomes a hindrance.
The main thing I don’t get though is… I never claimed my post will be useful to “most people”. Where did you take that claim? Why is everyone assigning that claim to me and then refuting it? I repeatedly said many times in the thread that I don’t expect this to be helpful to anyone except people like me — and everyone is arguing that no, you should do it the other way around. Where is this assumption coming from?
I didn't say it was bad. That's the miscommunication. You're taking it personally when people give you advice, and interpreting it as criticism.
(I mean, some people here are probably being obnoxious about it, but that's genuinely not my intent. I said at the very top of my first comment that if your method works for you, great! It's a completely normal part of learning to create explanations that fall apart with additional experience. For whatever it's worth, in the process of writing the previous comment, I looked up some things that refined my own understanding of the linguistics!)
Is it to not write at all about what works for me? Is it to change what I write into the “accepted” approach and away from what I actually wanted to write? Is it to present my writing differently?
What’s the actual thing that you think would make people in this thread happy (or maybe just you for a start). Like outcome-wise. Next time I write, I do… what?
If it’s to use kana in an article like this, it’s kind of like if I painted a picture of a cat and everyone said they would rather see a dog. OK but that’s not what I was painting? I set it as a constraint for myself to not use kana in the article. It would be a completely different article if it used kana, and that article wouldn’t be worth writing to me.
I shared what works for me, not what I’m recommending for everyone else. So what is the advice? Maybe it’s not to write at all? Some secret third thing?
Did you assume that I don’t know kana because I’m not using kana in the article?
Doesn't going straight to kana actually kind of obscure the relationship between nomu and nomi that they both begin nom-?
No, because nom- is not a sound that exists in Japanese phonetics.
nomu/nomi share the initial の, and む/み are in the same column of the kana table (五十音/gojuuon).
Because Japanese learners have been burned more often by snake oil, because it's both harder for most people trying to learn it than other languages and there are more people.
Despite my previous comment I don't recommend learning the written language first at all. The script is entirely too simple a model of language to even be useful. The first thing you are taught is that each character has one sounds, but that physically can't be true, there are millions of sounds and none of them sounds like an English speaking beginners' first guess. If Japanese was a formal system this might be desirable, but it's not. It's a physical means of communication and this "noise" is the error gradient that rewires your auditory cortex.
Learning Japanese is fun, and I encourage the author, and the readers of this post to continue learning. But my advice to new learners is to just get a textbook (or some structured material; but please, just get a textbook unless you are one of the minority cases where you can’t for the life of you follow a textbook) and learn the conjugations little by little as they advance through their textbook (or their alternative structured material) one chapter at a time and consume more and more advanced Japanese language material over the course of dozens of months.
For the people who do that, I promise you, if you study for an hour or two a day, just following some structured material aimed towards beginners (preferably a textbook) and engage with the language as frequently, you will intuitively understand and be able to produce the mostly correct (i.e. with diminishing errors) by 3-6 months.
In language learning you can run into a whole host of category errors and waste your time, learning words, grammar, culture, JLPT, hepburn, lingusistics, prosodic theory, an app, kanji instead of the language. It's a trap that obsessive people often fall into when they should have been listening to tapes until they can differentiate the sounds, match them to words and chatting with locals. Which is unfortunate since after learning the language these obsessive types could ace the JLPT no problem.
It seems like the article is trying to make the case that in romaji, you can split the letters and isolate the vowel (e.g. the asterix in the article's conjugation).
But we were simply taught to change from the う- row to the い- row (u- row to i- row). I switched to Japanese to illustrate that you can make that statement even without romaji. In that case, it seems like basically the same thing?
As an anecdotal point, my class was mostly non-english speakers and I didn't find the above to be a sticking point for my classmates. The real sticking points were messing up the ichidan verb exceptions (ichidan verbs that look like godan) and conjugating the correct form for the different grammar points. Te and ta form were also a bit tricky. But the article doesn't seem to offer anything new to help there.
That said, part of the challenge to myself with this article was to allow someone to learn Japanese conjugation even if they have zero knowledge of the language (even no kana). So that’s another constraint influencing my choice. I also wanted to have the visual “gluing” throughout the article as an aid for intuition, so that’s another reason I used romaji.
It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.
It is always a crutch for the first year student or the barely passed second year student that never helps with real Japanese.
Writing out romaji in Japan is likely to confuse more than help someone else understand.
I’ll be honest that I also wanted (as a challenge) to write this article so that a person with zero Japanese knowledge would be able to correctly conjugate almost every word to every ending. This is more of a teaching drill for myself though but it’s another reason for the romaji choice.
Latin text's smaller tokens/phonemes have advantages and disadvantages, but they are a convenient notation for getting the author's point across.
The difference in phonemes reminds me of how game designer Naramura came up with the (Spanish-sounding) name "La Mulana" for his game by spelling his name backwards in kana. In romaji it would have been "Arumaran" which is completely different (while in kanji it would have been "Muranara".)
Not quite. If you change the order of some kanji, the general case is that the resulting text has no definite pronunciation. You definitely would not expect that the sounds assigned to the kanji in one ordering would be the same ones assigned in a new ordering.
This is a phenomenon the Japanese sometimes play with. In the novel Musashi, Musashi comes up with that name by reinterpreting the characters of his actual name (which, in the novel, is Takezō).
If you're at the point you're learning verbs you'd be mad not to know how to read some kana.
This is completely nullified by all the drawbacks of using romaji while learning and they're well known already.
The only reason to use romaji for Japanese grammar is to explain the concepts to someone who has no interest in learning the language, just for their general knowledge.
This is why I think all the commenters obsessing over romaji just add fuel to the fire by being elitist over something that should only matter to an absolute beginner.
It's especially vain if the primary reason to choose one romanization strategy over another is to save keystrokes on a keyboard.
If you want some decent level of fluency then there is something you have to do, which is to communicate with other people in context and with specific goals in mind (get information, give information, make a request, etc). Whatever you can do to arrange for that to happen is probably more valuable than anything you can do online or with books. I personally like to recommend finding classes at a local college.
If you can’t get that, then I think the next best thing is reading and listening.
Drills are also necessary but you can easily fill your time with drills without advancing your ability to communicate or understand people.
There is plenty of research about what is / is not effective when it comes to learning languages so I encourage people to at least take a look at the results of that research rather than just go with whatever people recommend online (I’m just some random person online, I may be no better than the next). AI tools reportedly have a positive effect but they are not nearly as good as human interaction.
Mostly it helps to find learning resources that gel with your style of learning, and if possible, a tutor so you have a roadmap and more motivation. I found mine on italki. I also find Claude very helpful for sentence drills based on words and grammar I know.
And it's probably for their (our) good since interacting with other non-native speakers online is counterproductive for language learners.
I've dabbled a bit in Mandarin and while eventually i ended up liking Japanese more as a language, the Mandarin language learner community felt like such a warm bath in comparison. The people were friendly and welcoming and willing to help and genuinely excited to find more people wanting to learn the language.
Are you talking about the v-z-g-l sequence of harsh consonants? That looks uninviting in print, but in practice it's just a quick puff of air.
Erm, wtf? The English "si" sound does exist and sounds different from し. There is a reason people don't want to write Sinzyuku, and while I think they're making the wrong tradeoff, it is a tradeoff and should be acknowledged as such.
Wiktionary lists eight whole words that use it! (The entry for スィ itself, a couple obscure loanwords and proper names, and a couple alternate spellings of words that Japanese people normally pronounce using the "shi" sound.) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_terms_spell...
Scroll down to Gelernte Sprachen (=Languages being learned).
The data of the Swiss Federal Bureau of Statistics confirms that among languages currently being learned among the residents of Switzerland Japanese comes at 7th rank!
It is actively being studied by every 40th person above 25!
Everyone is a weeaboo!
The ranks are: 1 English (lingua franca of the world) 2 German (administrative language of most of Switzerland) 3 French (administrative language of 1/4 of Switzerland) 4 Italian (big minority language) 5 Spanish (first language with no direct connection to Switzerland) 6 Swiss German (oral language of most of Switzerland) 7 Japanese (everyone is a weeaboo) 8 Portuguese (another language with no direct connection to Switzerland)
Learning Japanese is about learning a new way of thinking and structuring your thoughts. The more you learn, the more you realize it just doesn't fit into the English world. You can't really translate Japanese into English without losing nuance — and sometimes that nuance is important. So start early and start training your brain to think in the language, instead of trying to translate it and force it into English or some other language brackets. It won’t work; it won’t make sense; you will get stressed and confused.
This is literally what I teach in the article, including these translations. Quoting it:
> in ichidan ("one-row") verbs like taberu, the last syllable of the stem is fixed. it's always going to be be, no matter the suffix:
>
> (table)
>
> it stays on a single row in the hiragana table, hence "one-row".
>
>on the other hand, in godan ("five-row") verbs like nomu, the final syllable of the stem alternates between ma, mi, mu, me, and mo:
> (table)
> it spans all the five rows, which is why it's godan ("five-row"). the m* "wildcard" represents the entire ma/mi/mu/me/mo column.
You’re also mischaracterising my approach. I am not teaching to “think in English”. Quoting from the article:
> i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table. so this is a reminder to not think in romaji when you do calculations. when we conjugate godan verbs, we literally go up and down the column. (maybe all these textbooks that used hiragana had a point!)
If you have objections, please engage with the article’s actual content, not with what you assume it is based on a glance (“oh he’s using romaji, this is thinking in English”). I’m using romaji for specific reasons that are motivated and explained in text, and I show every single pitfall of that choice as well.
I was speaking more broadly about learning Japanese and what I see on HN. Every six months or so, somebody discovers a clever pattern in the Japanese language. It’s almost always related to something taught in the beginning, the N5 level. And that pattern seems to have been eluding rest of us.
Specifically about your post, I think there's a shorter and simpler explanation of the verbs. One good example: https://kellenok.github.io/cure-script/5-verb-groups-and-the...
I’ve found this lesson difficult to digest when I tried her approach. It’s actually where I fell off and lost the interest the first time I tried to learn the language.
The comparable lesson is primarily https://kellenok.github.io/cure-script/7-5-conjugation.html, not the one you quoted. I prefer teaching it before the -te form because it’s more orderly.
If we reorder these two lessons and rely on romaji over kana, you basically get my approach. I found it helpful so I wrote it down.
But what you've already encountered is that everyone keeps insisting you should learn kana as soon as possible and avoid using romaji. I'm not gonna write an essay on why that is, but if you're serious about learning Japanese, you're gonna have to learn kana, and it's one of those things you should really get out of the way early.
Genki, for example, did a pretty awful job of explaining verbs. I bet a lot of people gave up right at that lesson. I myself have re-learned the verbs at least three times now. The first time, I learned all of them in the ます (masu) form. To conjugate, you just drop that and add another ending like ました (mashita) for past tense. That was a really bad approach :D But hey, it got me to learn 15 or so commonly used verbs.
Then the grandparent says something I agree with (don’t force the language into another language) but I don’t think it’s a fair description of what I’m doing. It sure looks like that’s what I’m doing, but I strongly believe that learning conjugation is primarily phonetical (it’s about how it sounds, not kana itself) and therefore romaji is just a better pedagogical choice for someone not already fluent with kana. And no, I don’t buy that you have to put being fluent in kana as a prerequisite. The whole conceit of the article is basically that you can learn almost the entire conjugation system in one evening with zero prior knowledge of the language. That alone justifies the small shortcut I took to get there.
I suspect this is true with most languages that are not in the same language family. The indoeuropean languages are all pretty similarly structured (don't @ me for not knowing the eighteenth tense of lithuanian), but it still takes time and effort for an english speaker to think in french, even if for the most part concepts translate directly. But bantu languages, eg kirundi or zulu, lean heavily on verbs with an entirely different conception of sentence structure and morphology, where you can stick entire clauses into one word, and you realize that your brain is picking up on patterns to decipher grammar that wouldn't make much sense in indoeuropean languages like dahl's law (except apparently in greek and sanskrit, where it's called grassman's law? Huh... now I know). Hausa is different still where you need to think about tense in an entirely different way—the pronoun is conjugated and the verb remains unchanged, and sometimes it feels like there are more irregular words than regular. Mandarin is beautiful, and actually quite simple to speak a little conversationally, if probably as difficult as english (or maybe more so) to master.
Learning foreign languages really makes you realize how central language is to basic cognition. You see the world in a different way, with different values and relations, depending on which language you speak/think in.
Ironically, I think this makes people extra susceptible to thinking that chatbots are intelligent (or even conscious, mr dawkins), even though it fails basic tests of memory and learning necessary to convincingly mimic understanding of, idk, time passing. Or motivation. Or emotion. But you can tell when it's awkwardly translating from another language in a way that a human would likely catch quite quickly if exposed to billions of documents.
Obviously, it applies to other languages, I’ve just been working a lot with French. Well, and my own language often leaks into English, of course.
I’d recommend r/LearnJapanese for finding material and ways to study.
But actually, I prefer the app "human japanese"
It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
Mu, bu and nu also all obey the -nda transformation due to phonetics, and not due to how "if we just shuffle the letters around and presto! Nomu becomes nonda".
Japanese already has plenty of its own reading inconsistencies, so adding another layer on top isn't going to help you.
Finally, there's going to be so much kana in your every day life that learning conjugation in romaji is guaranteed to cripple your reading, because instead of recognizing kana (e.g. you see a billboard that says お茶を飲んだ方がいい！ as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go) you've spent the first n hours on trying to "hack" the language instead of just learning it.
All of this is described just below, in the section called “why romaji is actually bad”, with these specific examples being tested.
> It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
This is also described further below in the post.
> as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go
I see “understanding the system” and “applying it fluently” as two separate activities. I find romaji more illustrative for the former because the system is phonetical on a sub-mora level. Whereas kana is more helpful for the latter. I don’t assume my reader is an idiot, and so I assume that they would be able to pick the right tool for the job on their learning journey. The fluency always layers on separately anyway, understanding doesn’t “help” there. It’s just that personally I find understanding a great motivator (and fallback) for developing fluency.