If it's taking you this much effort to do the trivial conjugations (seriously, the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down, and falls back on "yeah, you just have to memorize the patterns" for た/て forms), yeah, just memorise them. Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you; you actually just have to put the time and effort in.
Author here. Strong disagree.
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.
> I don’t know what you mean by “so much effort”.
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?
>This is a pretty long blog post covering really not very much.
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.
Indeed, especially for a language with forms of verb as regular as in Japanese. The whole language has two and a half irregular verbs. Compare that to Spanish and realize how fortunate you are to study Japanese verbs.
Spanish is not that bad: the conjugations are not gendered, while there are fewer than 20 major irregular patterns and about a dozen especially quirky verbs that you have to memorize in a few tenses (there are no 100% irregular verbs, most have at least some regular forms).
Source: I develop a conjugation app for a living
I suppose that Arabic or Russian may have it much worse.