Don’t want to sound negative, just want to share my observations as someone who’s been actively learning Japanese for a couple of years. I much prefer how Japanese people actually teach verbs: 一段 (ichidan), literally "1-step"; 五段 (godan), literally "5 steps", plus a few exceptions sometimes called irregular verbs. It's not hard; it makes sense, just some textbooks (e.g. Genki) teach it really bad.
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.
> I much prefer how Japanese people actually teach verbs: 一段 (ichidan), literally "1-step"; 五段 (godan), literally "5 steps", plus a few exceptions sometimes called irregular verbs
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.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to make sense of something new using terms and concepts you already know and that click for you. We all do it, me included.
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...
Sure. I like Cure Dolly. I’m actually surprised you bring her up because she gets a lot of purist haters too.
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.
So this whole thing is about romaji… Judging from your article and the comments you've been writing, you have strong feelings about it. Okay, you don't need kana to understand verb conjugation…
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.
I don't actually disagree that you should learn kana early. I just didn't want it to "block" the article because I genuinely believe learning kana can be done in parallel with understanding verb conjugation. There is no hard dependency between them at all. I particularly like that it unlocks the visualization of swapping in the vowel which kana obscures. And I like that the article is understandable to a reader with zero knowledge. That motivates the choice.
I get that: getting stuck on something, losing all interest, and just stopping altogether for a month or two. Happens to me from time to time.
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.
Where does the commenter say it was only a glance? I share the feeling.
The grandparent says it’s easier to teach by saying ichidan and godan actually mean “one-step” and “five-step”. That’s exactly what I’m teaching so it can’t be an argument against my article. This is something I not only say, but explicitly show visually with a table — as I have just quoted. From this I conclude the grandparent hasn’t read the article, and is commenting on vibes.
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 figured it was alluding to more conventional approaches to learning them. Reads like you’re making assumptions and defending instead of engaging with criticism in good faith.
“Don’t want to sound negative […] I much prefer” reads to me like a comment phrased against the article’s approach. Otherwise why would it “sound negative”? And what I’m saying is that it matches the article’s approach. Thus, the assumption. Where am I wrong or uncharitable?
> Learning Japanese is about learning a new way of thinking and structuring your thoughts.
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.
As an unrelated tangent, I love seeing it when the “thinking” in a native language leaks into the writing in another, I find it so endearing and intriguing. My French colleagues sometimes produce the weirdest English sentences (perfectly understandable just unusually phrased), that alone occasionally sparks my interest on picking up a bit of French — I just want to learn how different the grammar and sentence construction is!
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.
For anyone interested in this kind of concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Are there any books you'd recommend that get it right?
Don't know of any books that get it right. I don't think you can get it right the first time, it would be way too complex and technical. Most people would give up on the first lesson. Maybe better to treat it as an iterative process, which is how it's taught actually. First you learn it in some idealized, oversimplified concepts, then you go over them more deeply and pick up more nuance each time.
I’d recommend r/LearnJapanese for finding material and ways to study.
How about kellenok.github.io/cure-script/
But actually, I prefer the app "human japanese"