alt Hacker NewsMy interpretation is that there’s a lot of dogma around how Japanese “should” be learned, in particularly among the English-speaking community. This dogma includes things like “you must learn kana first”, so a romaji-centered article triggered the alarm bells. Then there’s the general distrust of crank-style “beginner discovers the universe and wants to teach everyone” which also has a flavor of “he doesn’t understand that the only true way to achieve fluency is talking to people” and so on. It hit all the common warning flags that set people off, and that emotional reaction is the backbone of the response. It’s not an unfamiliar dynamic, and it’s reminiscent of some programming subcommunities, although in programming this dogmatic “you must learn/teach things this way” norm was more common in 2000s, and has mostly subsided by the end of 2010s. Overall, I get the impression that for a lot of people the difficulty of learning the language, and in particularly the difficulty of teaching it to others, have led to this kind of conviction. Once you’re expressing this kind of righteous rejection, I think it can be tricky to see that it comes across as sneering and gatekeeping when seen from outside your community.
I see. Well, I already outlined why I thought the situation was happening — if you were trying to teach, I think you did it poorly and oscillated in your messaging from “this just works for me, personally” to “this my unorthodox method of teaching/explaining conjunctions in Japanese” (it’s clear even in comments here that you had to clarify multiple times your goals to different users).
Perhaps I am wrong but I personally don’t believe good teaching would get rejected by people (not organizations — this does happen) because of dogma. Being taught/explained something well is a very visceral experience, dogma can’t override it.
The other problem (people mistaking your personal experience for something else) could be improved by changes in your writing and messaging, and this is what I attempted to advise, I suppose. The writing will likely still be misinterpreted to a degree if what you’re saying about dogmatic thinking in the community is true, but, well, that’s the nature of communication — like with teaching, it involves working with particularities of other minds, simply being correct, methodical and rigorous in how you present arguments/topics can still result in failed communication.
Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable conversation. I apologize again if I came off negative or if my criticism was misplaced. Certainly wasn’t my intention. I genuinely enjoy many of the raised topics and was just interested in talking about them.
P.s. I would love read your failed experiences learning the language you mentioned in the blog and the comments here and what/how the traditional methods failed for you, if you ever decide to write about that, btw. I think it is a very beautiful moment when something one struggles with finally “clicks” —- I am fascinated by it and how it happens for different people.