Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

underreacted.leaflet.pub

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 276 posts

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#41

Post by Larrikin »

danabramov wrote: post #38
Larrikin wrote: post #35

I've found that any resource relying on any romaji after the first chapter or two is often a complete waste of time. 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…

I’ve explicitly addressed this in the article. Cmd+F for a section called “why romaji is actually good” and then “why romaji is actually bad”. You may disagree with the approach, but I outlined my reasons for choosing it (as well as its downsides).

I'm saying I disagree.

It is always a crutch for the first year student or the barely passed second year student that never helps with real Japanese.

Writing out romaji in Japan is likely to confuse more than help someone else understand.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#42

Post by danabramov »

eska wrote: post #21

I started to learn Japanese 30 years ago, and in my experience the people who try to be smart and build systems almost never get decent. It’s procrastination while thinking they’re actually productive. 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 ar…

Why would you expect the article where I’m describing what worked for me to “discover something new”? I’m literally sharing the mental model that I personally found helpful. There’s nothing “new” in learning or teaching a language. But this is the most minimal model I’ve found useful, compared to others, and I wanted to share it with other people.

I think you’re taking a lot of stuff for granted. “Just” do cards etc. You’re using the word “stem” but what’s a stem? Why do we sometimes inject -i or -a (or -wa) there and sometimes we don’t? You still have to learn that and understand that. That’s what I’m describing in the article. If you already know stems and how they compose with suffixes, congratulations, you won’t find my article useful.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#43

Post by danabramov »

refactor_master wrote: post #31

> why romaji is actually good 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 ha…

> It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu".

All of this is described just below, in the section called “why romaji is actually bad”, with these specific examples being tested.

> It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.

This is also described further below in the post.

> as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go

I see “understanding the system” and “applying it fluently” as two separate activities. I find romaji more illustrative for the former because the system is phonetical on a sub-mora level. Whereas kana is more helpful for the latter. I don’t assume my reader is an idiot, and so I assume that they would be able to pick the right tool for the job on their learning journey. The fluency always layers on separately anyway, understanding doesn’t “help” there. It’s just that personally I find understanding a great motivator (and fallback) for developing fluency.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#44

Post by danabramov »

lmm wrote: post #18
donw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um... 話します is the correct conjugation for 話す, what am I missing here?

The author is using an anglicised romaji system and evidently thinking in English, so they think writing 話します as "hanasimasu" is "wrong".

I feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article. As the article says below:

> this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.

Then the article includes an exercise that verifies the reader’s understanding.

I also included a note:

> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)

Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji, therefore it’s invalid.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#45

Post by danabramov »

klodolph wrote: post #15
donw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also still don't understand why the author thought this was wrong?

Because the author of the article hasn’t internalized that si is pronounced “shi”, is my guess.

The article literally says:

> there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. […] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. […] i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#46

Post by danabramov »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #26
wren6991 wrote: post #4

> now let's try to apply the rules: > 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 thin…

The Japanese phonological system doesn't allow a /s/ sound to occur before the vowel /i/, the consonant must undergo palatalization and become /ɕ/ (the IPA symbol for the Japanese sh-like sound). Because this is a regular sound rule, the native writing system doesn't have a way to distinguish the nonexistent */si/ sequence from the /ɕi/ sequence that actually occurs, and this is the syllable that hiragana し or kataka…

> And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet

I don’t understand where this misunderstanding about my article comes from. I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”. My article uses romaji so this is self-consistent. I am also mentioning that there is an alternative system that would romanize it as “si” but that’s not the one I’m using in my article.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#47

Post by danabramov »

mc3301 wrote: post #3
holistio wrote: post #2

Fascinating to hear non-tech insight from Dan, especially as a fellow (rookie) student of 日本語.

Fun, and a programmatic perspective. However, it can be too easy and fun to get super caught up in these details, if your goals are some level of fluency and ability to communicate/read. The majority of people that I know who have gained any level of fluency in Japanese as an adult mostly avoided stuff like this because (for many people; of course everybody is different) doing all of this mental math to dive down to…

Maybe it’s not very clear but I don’t suggest studying from articles like this alone. Obviously you need to do sentence drills and talk to a tutor or native speakers to have any chance of success. I still find documenting my mental model helpful because most articles I’ve seen before were not teaching it clearly enough for my taste.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#48

Post by danabramov »

klodolph wrote: post #7

:( 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 conjuga…

Both of these things are described in the article. The first one is in “why romaji is actually bad” section, the second one is in “one more thing” part at the very end.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#49

Post by danabramov »

Larrikin wrote: post #41
danabramov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve explicitly addressed this in the article. Cmd+F for a section called “why romaji is actually good” and then “why romaji is actually bad”. You may disagree with the approach, but I outlined my reasons for choosing it (as well as its downsides).

I'm saying I disagree. It is always a crutch for the first year student or the barely passed second year student that never helps with real Japanese. Writing out romaji in Japan is likely to confuse more than help someone else understand.

You glossed over my point. I’m not using it as a “crutch” for reading. I’m using it to have notation for the stem — the thing before -u. I could choose alternative notation with kana (e.g. just always using the -u ending, or the idea of variable stems like i-stem and a-stem) but then the visual “gluing” wouldn’t work. Which is the whole point of mental model I’m communicating. It’s fine if you don’t find this mental model helpful but it’s the point of the article.

I’ll be honest that I also wanted (as a challenge) to write this article so that a person with zero Japanese knowledge would be able to correctly conjugate almost every word to every ending. This is more of a teaching drill for myself though but it’s another reason for the romaji choice.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#50

Post by danabramov »

csande17 wrote: post #22
eska wrote: post #21

I started to learn Japanese 30 years ago, and in my experience the people who try to be smart and build systems almost never get decent. It’s procrastination while thinking they’re actually productive. 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 ar…

Similarly, when complaining about how you have to memorize a big table of verb conjugations in the intro, the author links to a table of... -ta forms, a verb form for which the author later concludes you just have to memorize a big table.

The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system that doesn’t reduce further. I think there’s still value in having a solid model for everything else. At least I personally found it valuable, which is why I thought to share it with people.
Post reply on HN