As someone who's never tried learning Japanese, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the deep dive and am now less afraid to check out some more serious tutorials (though I wish everyone put as much effort into explaining the system behind something so often dismissed as "just memorise it").

> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)

I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as し on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi".

I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.

Dan, this is cool, and I can tell you enjoyed writing this up and thinking it through as you wrote. Don’t let the haters get you down.

I think you’d like Orbit (withorbit.com), a tool that got built out of some experimental learning work I think originally done at quantum.country — it’s intended as a sort of toolkit to help turn blog content into spaced repitition inline memorization tools.

Check it out! I think the post would benefit from something like this - it’s fun for most to play with seeing how they are understanding this, and you spend a lot of time trying to create a bit of interactive reading/thinking in the blog.

Keep writing, please, it’s good.

It seems like the article is trying to make the case that in romaji, you can split the letters and isolate the vowel (e.g. the asterix in the article's conjugation).

But we were simply taught to change from the う- row to the い- row (u- row to i- row). I switched to Japanese to illustrate that you can make that statement even without romaji. In that case, it seems like basically the same thing?

As an anecdotal point, my class was mostly non-english speakers and I didn't find the above to be a sticking point for my classmates. The real sticking points were messing up the ichidan verb exceptions (ichidan verbs that look like godan) and conjugating the correct form for the different grammar points. Te and ta form were also a bit tricky. But the article doesn't seem to offer anything new to help there.

It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.

Scroll down to Gelernte Sprachen (=Languages being learned).

The data of the Swiss Federal Bureau of Statistics confirms that among languages currently being learned among the residents of Switzerland Japanese comes at 7th rank!

It is actively being studied by every 40th person above 25!

Everyone is a weeaboo!

The ranks are: 1 English (lingua franca of the world) 2 German (administrative language of most of Switzerland) 3 French (administrative language of 1/4 of Switzerland) 4 Italian (big minority language) 5 Spanish (first language with no direct connection to Switzerland) 6 Swiss German (oral language of most of Switzerland) 7 Japanese (everyone is a weeaboo) 8 Portuguese (another language with no direct connection to Switzerland)

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.

It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.

Mu, bu and nu also all obey the -nda transformation due to phonetics, and not due to how "if we just shuffle the letters around and presto! Nomu becomes nonda".

Japanese already has plenty of its own reading inconsistencies, so adding another layer on top isn't going to help you.

Finally, there's going to be so much kana in your every day life that learning conjugation in romaji is guaranteed to cripple your reading, because instead of recognizing kana (e.g. you see a billboard that says お茶を飲んだ方がいい！ as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go) you've spent the first n hours on trying to "hack" the language instead of just learning it.

To add insult to injury this article hasn’t discovered anything new, makes it sound way more complicated than it is, and in the end still requires you to just remember which verbs are of the eru/iru group, and which are not (which was posed as a problem to solve in the intro).

Just make cards and mark the stem, learn it along with the verb. No need for heuristics. If you ever forget, you’re bound to remember the masu-form and can reverse engineer the stem from that 100%.

First, we learnt verbs in the -masu form. Nomimasu, tabemasu and so on.

Then we learnt this song (to the tune of Clementine)

chi ri i tte mi ni bi nde kiite giite

It's a quick mneumonic to help you go from the polite verb to the "te-form" ending. I hummed it in my head while working out the conjugation before it became natural and "obvious".

(and it comes with very enjoyable audio tapes and anki cards to boot)

Highly recommended.

Like so much pedagogy, this feels like a good example of "hey, here's a quick-and-dirty heuristic for how this thing works, but just keep in mind that we'll explain how it really works later on". Except Genki I+II never mentions the terms 「一段」or「五段」at all. (it's similarly criminal that they never introduce pitch accent either, but that's another story).

My advice to anyone getting started with Japanese would be to get out of the introductory textbook stage as quickly as possible. Supplement with grammar explanations from other resources early on. Cure Dolly, Imabi.net, Tofugu, YouTubers, LLMs--whatever clicks with you.

I'm just glad that early in my learning journey, I heard a YouTuber describe Japanese as "agglutinative" (with a comparison to German)--a term I'd never encountered before. A light bulb went off for me and things started to click.

In any event, glad to see this kind of article kick off discussion/debate :D. 皆さんは、頑張りましょう！

Romaji are great, and in some ways more instructive because they reveal patterns which are otherwise a little hidden. You just have to realize that S+I is shi, T+U is tsu, etc. I don’t want to get too deep into it but there is a regularity to the language, and rules, and different choices of writing system reveals different pieces of the puzzle.

Next, the conjugation itself. There are massive categories of conjugations missing! Like, how do you get from taberu / nomu in this system to tabereru / nomereru? It turns out that these ichidan and godan verbs actually do have some differences in conjugation. Who’d have thought? (There is the -i stem, but there are other forms.)

https://github.com/yudataguy/Awesome-Japanese

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language

Maybe it's because I'm at a different part of my learning journey, but this seems to go on and on and on about godan v ichidan verbs but doesn't touch on the actual conjugation (ie. how to turn "drink" into "didn't want to drink"), nor on plain form (everything is in polite form), and te-form gets a very very short mention at the end x_x

Also, the romaji did my head in but I understand that was done for a reason (I don't agree with the reason, but at least there was one)

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).

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.

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.

There’s no clever engineer hack that replaces time spent with the language. and with regard to japanese, please stay away from romaji, unless you're still in beginner stage and typing things out to communicate words you already know the phonetics to.

I prefer the term "group 2 verbs" to "-ru verbs." Group 2 verbs are verbs that end in -eru or -iru, not just -ru. Of course there are some exceptions, like kaeru, which ends in -eru but is actually a -u verb. Conjugation is easy: remove the final -ru and append -masu, -mashita, etc.

"Group 1 verbs" (again, -u verbs) are verbs that are not group 2 verbs. Conjugation is a bit more difficult because the -nu, -bu, -mu, and -u verbs have many suffixes. However, after memorizing these two (-nbmu and -u, because -nu, -bu, and -mu are almost the same), the rest are easy.

There are only two irregular verbs: kuru and suru. Just memorize them.

I learned Japanese by just memorizing. Once you have memorized enough verbs and their conjugations, you can figure out the conjugation of a new verb even if you don't understand how it works.

i chi ri tte

bi mi ni nde

ki ite

gi ite

shi shite