Maybe it helps to explain the purpose of the article. My purpose is to help people who have fallen off originally with traditional approaches by showing an alternative way to build up the intuition. This precise order of layering is what I found most helpful, so that’s why I wrote it in that order. The constraints I’ve chosen (assume the reader has zero knowledge; write things as they sound; give an almost complete system in one evening) are maybe strange. And yes, my style is verbose and you could compress that by a lot if you don’t mind people stumbling. I tried to hand-hold every transition pretty closely.

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.