alt Hacker NewsThere are lots of people in the comments somehow offended by the author's genuine excitement over the method that worked well enough for them that they wanted to share it.
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").
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I think for a very specific audience the article is useful: an English speaker who is in the first month of learning Japanese and is having trouble understanding the basics of Japanese verb conjugation.
If you are not in that target audience, the article is not that useful. If are starting to learn Japanese, you would not start by reading this article. And once you are past your first month of learning Japanese, you have internalized how this basic part of Japanese verb conjugation works and thus the article seems hyper focused a tiny part of learning Japanese. So it’s predictable that people would point out the limited scope of the article.
I think “Aeron Buchanan's Japanese Verb Chart” offers a more complete overview of Japanese verb conjugation in a more concise form. It expects you to know how to read hiragana, which is reasonable because it’s one of the first things you learn when studying Japanese.
This kind of content is usually shared by people who are learning a language out of genuine interest for the first time. Most of the time it's Japanese because of the popularity manga and anime enjoy, and the challenge of learning a language that's so different from one's mother tongue. There are countless blog posts written by people to whom it "clicks" for the first time, and they excitedly run to their computer to share their novel experience. I don't see anything wrong with this, let them enjoy the moment. But if they stick to their learning routine, they will inevitably learn the truth that is that the only way to learn a language is to interact with it a lot through all possible channels - speaking, listening, reading, writing. Mnemonics may work for some time, but in the end one won't be able to actually use the language if they don't learn it intuitively. And there is also the fact that most of those people live in places where Japanese is not in everyday use, limiting their opportunities to practice it.
Senior management at a Japanese tech company, 2 kids, most of my daily life in Japanese here. Can confidently talk circles around most N1s.
I agree. I had plenty of strange abstractions and crutches when starting out learning Japanese, and starting in romaji was absolutely fine. While the post wouldn't benefit me now, starting out any useful mental shortcuts to producing Japanese would have been most welcome.
Thanks! I’d say that a big part of the motivation for me was to show that this piece is orthogonal to the rest of the language. You can sit down and understand how to conjugate almost any word to almost every suffix in the time it takes to read this. Yes — not fluently — and not “understanding” the language — but it’s wild to me that you can do that at all! It wasn’t obvious to me that this knowledge is orthogonal to everything else.
That’s what motivated me to write about it, really. In language courses all of this is often spread out over weeks or months. I thought it would be fun to write something that you can read in one evening and map out almost the entire system. With no prerequisites.
This is a quite weird article. It opens with several paragraphs about romaji, implying the target audience are not familiar with romaji/kana already. But it's way, way too early for such a reader to worry about verb conjugation.
> There are lots of people in the comments somehow offended by the author's genuine excitement over the method that worked well enough for them that they wanted to share it.
Did it work for them though? They apparently never got past the basics. So IMO it's more likely the opposite; they've distracted themselves from getting on with learning.
Because the whole article is built upon a straw man (it's not usually taught the way he claims) and the "method" is just a normal explanation (see this section on wikipedia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_conjugation#Verb_grou...
As someone who is fluent in Japanese, the thing is that this is not an example of a method that works well, it’s an example of a beginner coming up with an overwrought headcanon (while calling it “simple”, nonetheless!) that ultimately will hinder their understanding, as I will detail elsewhere.
If this was a similar post about programming, it would not get upvoted here because more people would recognise it for what it is: a “Monads are Like Burritos” post from a well-meaning but misguided beginner.