I genuinely don't understand where our disconnect is.

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.