Posted by valzevul 2 days ago
Japanese is known as an agglutinative language [0], and how verbs are conjugated also has a lot to do with politeness, as well as local dialects. That's why you can turn on an anime and hardly understand it, even after a couple years of study.
I got to the third year college level in my own Japanese studies, and at that point, memorizing kanji was starting to compete with my computer science studies, so I had to drop it. I got to travel to Japan and live with host families (we kind of settled on a Japanese/English pidgin), so I don't regret the experience.
If you want to procrastinate actually learning (the HN way): scraping and parsing a couple of dictionaries, stroke samples, and sentence translation repos, setting them up in a local sqlite db and have fun exploring connections in the language with SQL queries. Guaranteed to keep you away from actually learning the language for at least 2 months.
In seriousness, I do recommend textbooks above anything else. Structure is your no. 1 friend as you go through the language. Go to r/LearnJapanese to find the right textbook for you. Use apps only complement your learning, SRS is amazing for memorization and Anki is pretty good to optimize your vocab. Same goes for my app Shodoku. Only use it to complement your learning, if you want to learn how to write, write primarily in your notebook and only go through the app to optimize your memory.
E.g. potential of 買う (kau, to buy) is 買える (kaeru), which is spelled like 帰る (kaeru, to return home).
It reminds of you how "lay" is a verb (to put something into a flat resting position, but is also the past tense of "to lie" (take on a supine position).
Today, I lay bricks; yesterday I lay in bed all day.
Plus lie and lie are examples of how English verbs can be homonyms in dictionary form, but conjugate differently, something we see in Japanese (either actual homonyms or near homonyms modulo pitch accent).
It is definitely well written and presented.
I like to use this metaphor, though. You're hiking a mountain, this journey to the "peak" is reaching some goal of fluency.
It's fun to stop and look at rocks, examining, comparing and whatnot. But it doesn't necessarily get you closer to the peak. I mean, it might, because you'll better understand your footing every-so-slightly. Not a perfect metaphor.
I have a hard time understanding why people object to this kind of attempt to systematize something that conventionally relies on rote learning. I've always found that figuring out the underlying rules helps with the rote learning. When you see some new word or conjugation, it's super helpful to have a method for explaining why it's that way; it helps fix it in your mind.
I wonder if native speakers object to this approach because it isn't really how you learn as a kid. You don't learn any abstract rules, you just absorb a huge amount of training material and construct your own model. But that doesn't mean adults need to learn in the same way; we can and should leverage our painfully-acquired knowledge and skills from other domains.
For me, the first half of the article could be removed and the learning could simply start with “there are two types of verbs in Japanese (+ some irregular verbs), one type conjugates without alternation in the root, the other with”. That’s enough to get the mental model but my native languages have alternation to begin with so it’s an intuitive concept.
Writing about learning languages is tricky because you cannot write for a universal audience, you have to write for speakers of a particular language (I suppose English in this case, since the article is in English), you’re also lucky if you know whether they have ever learned any other foreign language, and what particular education system they’re coming from (some education systems teach basics of linguistics and its terminology, some don’t — a language teacher might find themselves having a class full of people who have never learned what a clause, subject, object, or conjunction are, who don’t have the mental model to operate with these categories).
I don’t speak any Japanese and your explanation was understandable to me (even if there were some redundancies) but I think the negative reaction in the comments is just because of mismatch of your mental model of a language and people’s mental models.
I understand you were writing about your own process of filling the gaps (btw, I also find it easier, or at least more fun, to understand the basics of grammar before memorizing all the specific forms), but I think it’s not very clear from the article as some in the comments seemed to expect to learn from it, rather than learn about how you solved a particular obstacle in your learning.
I hope I am not coming off as bashing you or your writing. I now regret writing my original comment now that I read all the other replies — it looks like I am your work calling the article redundant, I am sorry for that. I hope you continue writing about your learning path — language learning is fascinating, and the more information we share about how we learn, the easier it is for everyone. And Japanese is a very beautiful language! Kudos to you for tackling it.
Teaching is a very particular skillset and craft, especially teaching languages. It should be grounded in a teacher’s own experience learning something as it helps them to empathize with the learner but simply talking about how you learned something is not teaching.
E.g. the visualization you’re proud of — what problem does it solve for your potential learners? Do they actually have this problem? Not your assumption of the problem but you actually seeing them experiencing this problem and offering them visualization and seeing how it helps them to close the gap? If yes, why do you think your approach failed for HN audience?
If you taught, you know that you and your mind don’t matter much in the process of teaching, your student’s mind is in the center.
Talking about something based on your own experience into an abstract void and hoping that some lurker’s mental model matches yours is not a rigorous pedagogical approach.
I do suggest to experiment with your writing — try writing only about your own journey (and nothing else!), try sitting down with another person, multiple people, and teaching them the same thing. Try writing a post for them and them only after the session and see whether there are any differences.
A good teacher is not the one who proclaims themselves to be one.
Good luck!
And I said that, in my opinion, this is where your post failed to communicate what you intended to communicate and you have a crowd of “aktshually, this is wrong” in the comments.
Seriously, without any snark intended, if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”.
Bad teaching elicits negative response, so don’t mislead people into thinking you will teach them anything. If they learn because your heuristic works for them, they will.
I might be wrong, of course, but I believe (and hope) that you will have a lot more empathetic and friendly response.
You didn’t hit a nerve, I just like talking about communication and learning.
This is literally what my post says!!! It’s the entire framing of the post. Please read it:
> i've tried to learn Japanese verb conjugation a few times before. at first, it looks simple (you just swap suffixes!), but there's a lot of nuance that can drag you down as a learner. i found a system i prefer but let me first explain why i struggled. […] i found this approach to teaching deeply frustrating and unsatisfying.
You’re projecting some kind of fantasy onto my post where it’s presumably claiming that it’s the best way to learn or that I’m a great teacher or whatever. Instead the post is literally sharing what worked for me, and what I wish was available.
> I understand you were writing about your own process of filling the gaps (btw, I also find it easier, or at least more fun, to understand the basics of grammar before memorizing all the specific forms)
(you focused on the fact that you also aimed to teach and we discussed that aspect a little bit), but a lot of people in the comments didn’t understand the goal of your post — why do you think it happened?
Perhaps I am wrong but I personally don’t believe good teaching would get rejected by people (not organizations — this does happen) because of dogma. Being taught/explained something well is a very visceral experience, dogma can’t override it.
The other problem (people mistaking your personal experience for something else) could be improved by changes in your writing and messaging, and this is what I attempted to advise, I suppose. The writing will likely still be misinterpreted to a degree if what you’re saying about dogmatic thinking in the community is true, but, well, that’s the nature of communication — like with teaching, it involves working with particularities of other minds, simply being correct, methodical and rigorous in how you present arguments/topics can still result in failed communication.
Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable conversation. I apologize again if I came off negative or if my criticism was misplaced. Certainly wasn’t my intention. I genuinely enjoy many of the raised topics and was just interested in talking about them.
P.s. I would love read your failed experiences learning the language you mentioned in the blog and the comments here and what/how the traditional methods failed for you, if you ever decide to write about that, btw. I think it is a very beautiful moment when something one struggles with finally “clicks” —- I am fascinated by it and how it happens for different people.
To me, “this just works for me, personally” and “this my unorthodox method of teaching/explaining conjunctions in Japanese” is the same thing. It's just my style of writing. You can check some of my “proper” articles to see the pattern. Here I’m “teaching” basics of Lean: https://overreacted.io/the-math-is-haunted/. Here I’m “teaching” algebraic effects: https://overreacted.io/algebraic-effects-for-the-rest-of-us/. Here I'm “teaching” a particular React API: https://overreacted.io/a-complete-guide-to-useeffect/.
In all of those cases, my approach is to unroll my own mental model into the shortest topologically sorted path, and to share it with people in the form of a post. You could say that all of this is bullshit, maybe. From the past, I’ve gotten plenty of feedback that this approach has helped other people understand the things I’m explaining. So I have anecdotal evidence this is “teaching”, if you so insist on gatekeeping the term to the “proven” instances of someone else understanding it. My process here has been exactly the same. So yes, it’s both “sharing what works for me” and “my quirky take on it” and (I’m sorry) “how I teach this” because this is all the same thing to me. It’s not the same thing to you, and that’s fine, we just disagree on definitions.
I also don’t think it’s fair to say that “people” “rejected” my “teaching” here and therefore it’s bad. There's some positive comments here, I’ve seen positive comments on other platforms. Quoting a few of them: “I thought this was a great post, thank you for writing it :)”, “I'm not learning Japanese but I enjoyed reading this nonetheless”, “this is cool”, “Really good read that anyone interested should check out”, “This was VERY helpful, thank you! Hoping for more articles along the same lines of "engineer deconstructs a language and makes it more approachable", esp for Japanese.”. Do these responses satisfy your definition? Do I need to carry them around and present them to HN readers? This is extremely silly. The vast majority of the reaction here has been from people who already know the topic and have strong opinions about how it should be taught which is clearly not the audience for the article. If you want to run an experiment on a clean group of people, go ahead and tell me the results. I just wrote a post into the void. That’s what I do when I learn things.
I still find the way you talk “(people mistaking your personal experience for something else)” — presumably still banging on the “this is not good teaching” drum — very condescending. As I find most of this thread.
The conclusion I am drawing from this is that I simply do not belong in the English-speaking Japanese-learning community. I am clearly breaking some kind of unspoken norms around what is appropriate to consider “teaching”, who is allowed to “teach” without being sneered at, how modestly one needs to talk about own writing, and so on. I do not abide by these norms, and have very little desire to engage with this subculture. I will likely continue writing about my experience of learning Japanese, and will continue considering it “teaching” because I know it will reach some people like me. I don’t know if I’ll have the restraint to stay away from these discussions, but this is probably the most unpleasant cloud of online interaction I’ve had for months. I feel upset, not in the sense that I expected praise, but at the sheer tone of this discussion and at the attempts to put me in my place, so to speak. No thank you.
If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language, it behooves you to adopt "si" and "ti", because they bring in a consistency needed by such a system to be complete.
That's how all conjugation schemes work. There's nothing weird about this. Stems aren't supposed to exist in the spoken language. But they are observable in the spoken language.
Compare how a modern dictionary will give you ποιέω, a full and fully-inflected word which doesn't actually exist in ancient Greek, as the first principle part of that verb. This is done because the stem of the verb is ποιε-, and the epsilon ending the stem can be easily observed by its effect on most of the conjugational endings. It doesn't happen to affect the first-person singular ending -ω (to be precise, the contraction of ε- with -ω is -ω), so the dictionary form is synthetic, chosen to be informative.
It's still the case that Japanese speakers have difficulty producing the hypothetical sound 'si', but that doesn't mean that the syllable which is notionally given that place in the kana table represents that hypothetical sound. In English we have the very similar rule that the cluster /sj/ may be reduced to /ʃ/, but this obviously doesn't prove that the word "sheep" begins with the phoneme /s/.
No romanization scheme captures all the phonetic nuances of Japanese.
And neither does the Japanese writing system.
They are not intended to be detailed models of the spoken language.
> that doesn't mean that the syllable which is notionally given that place in the kana table represents that hypothetical sound
It's all convention. The umbrella handle し is also "notionally present" in the table, and represents the sound only by convention.
I have a native language in which the written combination "ni" often, but not always corresponds to a palatized n, very similar to the Japanese one. In other situations, the palatized n has to be explicitly annotated as ň. There are also exceptional siguations, like the names Niagara or Nikaragua, or the word nikotín.
If we were not to have any conventions like this, we would have to write using IPA symbols! That has downsides. One is the proliferation of symbols. The other is the need to adjust the phonetic spellings for regional dialects, and over time as phonetics changes. In other words, the writing system being a detailed model of phonetics is not necessarily a good thing.
> No romanization scheme captures all the phonetic nuances of Japanese.
The fact that alveolar and palatalized sibilants both exist as contrasting phonemes is not a "nuance". It will be represented in every writing system that anyone ever puts forward, as indeed it already is.
The only advantage of putting 'si' in a Romanization of Japanese is that it corresponds well to the official alphabetical order of Japan. There is no other reason you'd do it.
Romanization systems that use "si" and its ilk are obviously out of favor for the purposes of romanization; I'm not proposing to popularize that. (And really, romanization as such should be largely avoided; relying on it is a trap for learners).
But there is a small advantage in that if you are typing Japanese with romaji-based IME on a device, it is two keystrokes to code し using "si" compared to three keystrokes for "shi", so why not.
I'm not sure what you mean by "exist as contrasting phonemes". There do not exist two phonemes "si" and "shi" at all, in Japanese, let alone as pairs that can be substituted in the same spot of a word to change its meaning. If you speak such that you substitute si for shi, you will still be understood. There are foreign accents like that in Japan. I've also heard unpalatized "ni".
There is no need to encode rules like s* + i -> shi, because that is taken care of by the existing understanding that si encodes shi.
The romaji notation is not phoentically accurate to begin with (and neither are the Japanese writing systems); like it doesn't capture nasalization of G followed by N and what not. The "n" in "na" and oni" is different, yet we don't write ñi or whatever to indicate the palatization. The Hepburn romanization is just based on what is or is not convenient relative to English.
I prefer having a system to simply memorizing. I don’t know what you mean by “so much effort”. I am literally just describing the system as it is brick by brick. If you see an opportunity to simplify, you’re welcome to provide a specific suggestion. I find this system rather elegant, and I tried to build it piece by piece because that’s my preferred way both to learn and to teach.
>the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down
The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I don’t consider it more “interesting” and I’d argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise. So I didn’t spend much time on te/ta-form. (That said, even for -te/ta form, I find it calming to think of -nda as a contraction of -nita, and so on, which AFAIK is in the ballpark of what historically happened.)
> Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you
I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if there’s a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it. Even if there’s a layer of memorization and repetition to achieve actual fluency. Japanese conjugation is a rare case where the system actually is very clear and methodical. The article is written for people like me who also prefer to know it. There’s literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I don’t understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
This is a pretty long blog post covering really not very much.
> The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I don’t consider it more “interesting” and I’d argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise.
It's not just te/ta, you don't mention anything other than the basic polite/casual, positive/negative, and desiderative. At the very end you point to conditional and causative but say you haven't studied them, and no mention at all of passive, imperative, causative passive, or volitional.
> I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if there’s a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it.
And how's that working out for you?
> There’s literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I don’t understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
I find it very presumptive to propose to "teach" what you haven't really learnt. How many people have successfully become remotely close to fluent following this approach? It's 0, right? What makes you think you're "teaching" rather than leading people astray?
Fine, it's too verbose for you. I like this pacing and level of verbosity for my own learning. I wrote it for people like me.
>At the very end you point to conditional and causative but say you haven't studied them, and no mention at all of passive, imperative, causative passive, or volitional.
I haven't studied them (as in "what they mean") but I've gone through all tables of "how they attach" as part of researching the article. Let's catalogue them:
- Conditional and casuative: Fully covered by the article's last section.
- Volitional: Same pattern. In article's notation, it's -[y]ou.
- Passive: Same pattern. In article's notation, it's -[r]areru.
- Causative passive: Same pattern. In article's notation, -[s]aserareru. (I guess there's a special case there for when it contracts.)
- Imperative: Genuinely two cases that IMO are easier to teach separately.
If something's actually wrong, please correct it! I think the article gives a genuinely good scaffolding. By the time you get to these advanced cases, you're comfortable enough with the base model to split them up.
>And how's that working out for you?
Can you stop with your condescending sneering? It's working out well for me.
>I find it very presumptive to propose to "teach" what you haven't really learnt.
I think the article is rigorous in the scope it tackles. If it's not, you would have pointed out the mistakes by now. I also think a beginner has full license to teach if they stay rigorous. It's just a market of approaches.
Source: I develop a conjugation app for a living