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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

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Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#61

Post by musicale »

danabramov wrote: post #49
Larrikin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The explanation made sense to me: romaji works well for vowel shifts (as the vowels aren't glued to consonants) while kana works well for consonant shifts (because the vowels are glued to consonants).

Latin text's smaller tokens/phonemes have advantages and disadvantages, but they are a convenient notation for getting the author's point across.

The difference in phonemes reminds me of how game designer Naramura came up with the (Spanish-sounding) name "La Mulana" for his game by spelling his name backwards in kana. In romaji it would have been "Arumaran" which is completely different (while in kanji it would have been "Muranara".)

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#62

Post by klodolph »

danabramov wrote: post #60
klodolph wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, As a basic part of Japanese language education, students are expected to be familiar with different romanization systems. If you ask a student where “si” is in the table, they should be able to find it. If a student says “it’s not in the table” then they’ve failed the lesson or there is something wrong with the teaching material. Second: am I arguing that the choice of using Hepburn here is somehow bad? Yes, t…

We’re talking about the same thing but you insist that there is only one angle under which things aren’t confusing. I disagree. That’s fine. The two systems are isomorphic, and I genuinely believe that, given I’ve described every single caveat of Hepburn in the article, I’ve paid my dues for using it. YMMV. I even include the “finding in the table” part. I think I agree that Nihon-shiki and explaining it upfront woul…

The systems are obviously not isomorphic—Japanese kana are not entirely phonetic (they are just mostly so) and the different romanization systems choose differently whether to follow orthography or phonetics more closely.

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

I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible. Like, if I don’t understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together don’t produce the right Hepburn in the end?

YMMV indeed, but I think the lesson here is “this is why you don’t use Hepburn when you’re writing an article about Japanese verb conjugations”.

Hepburn does make sense for somebody with zero knowledge of Japanese but it just gets in the way when you are trying to explain how Japanese works. So lesson zero is “don’t rely on Hepburn” and IMO if you are interested in pronunciation and listening you should be using audio as your primary source.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#63

Post by danabramov »

klodolph wrote: post #62
danabramov wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re talking about the same thing but you insist that there is only one angle under which things aren’t confusing. I disagree. That’s fine. The two systems are isomorphic, and I genuinely believe that, given I’ve described every single caveat of Hepburn in the article, I’ve paid my dues for using it. YMMV. I even include the “finding in the table” part. I think I agree that Nihon-shiki and explaining it upfront woul…

The systems are obviously not isomorphic—Japanese kana are not entirely phonetic (they are just mostly so) and the different romanization systems choose differently whether to follow orthography or phonetics more closely. > hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!) I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible. Like, if I don’t understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just…

I’m saying that Hepburn is isomorphic to Nihon-shiki since each is an encoding of kana. Each of them is a bijection to kana (actually that’s wrong; see EDIT below), therefore there’s a bijection between them. Obviously I’m not saying that arbitrary latin characters are isomorphic to kana, that would make zero sense.

I sympathise with your point about the benefits of Nihon-shiki romanization here. It might’ve been a better choice for this article.

> I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible

I think the reader would just read the next section where I use your argument to critique my own approach? And then make up their own mind whether it’s defensible to do something in the article, to raise pros/cons for why I did it, and then to keep on with the choice.

I wanted to illustrate this confusing point, and that’s how I chose to illustrate it. I think it’s confusing either way. I trust that a reader who actually wants to learn, and isn’t just being a pedant, would carry away the right set of conclusions, and would understand the isomorphism (again — see EDIT below) after those two sections.

> Like, if I don’t understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together don’t produce the right Hepburn in the end?

Yeah. So that’s a learning opportunity that kana row shifting doesn’t quite follow rules you might expect from many other languages. Maybe that’s a clunky way to introduce it. I personally like this framing. As I noted somewhere else, you could imagine that I’ve chosen IPA notation instead.

—

EDIT: Actually wait, Hepburn is not bijective for zu and ji. I haven’t thought about that. It’s not relevant to any of the conjugations so it doesn’t break the article, but that may be a good argument that it’s not worth the effort rescuing Hepburn.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#64

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

Kunrei shiki was abandoned a few months ago.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#65

Post by danabramov »

smburdick wrote: post #23

Calling it concatenation is a little misleading. 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 w…

It’s concatenation with the asterisk, and the asterisk is what we build throughout the article.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#66

Post by klodolph »

danabramov wrote: post #56
klodolph wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s probably a mistake to use Hepburn if you’re learning Japanese, it kinda gets in the way. Either learn kana (which takes what, a week?) or use one of the other romanization systems which maps more cleanly to Japanese orthography

It’s a deliberate choice in the article. I cover every single caveat with it explicitly. I also mention this: > (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.)

That note isn’t much to go on.

I think the choice is not a good one, whether it is deliberate or by accident, it is not a good choice either way. The main caveat to Hepburn is that it’s unsuitable for explaining how Japanese works and it’s unsuitable for learning Japanese—so before you start working on verb conjugations, you pick up kana or one of the romanizations which is more aligned with Japanese.

The idea that you “shouldn’t think in romaji” is really “you shouldn’t think in Hepburn”. This is an important distinction! Japanese has a relatively small inventory of phonemes, somewhere around 20 or 22 of them, and they map very neatly to the latin alphabet.

But the article doesn’t make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.

IMO, this is kind of like seeing an article about how monads are burritos. Thinking that a monad is a burrito does not help me understand monads.

Nomu -> noma-nai / nomi-masu / nome-ru / nomo-u

Miru -> mi-nai / mi-masu / mire-ru / miyo-u

The ichidan and godan verbs are not assigned different categories because existing scholars of Japanese are just bad at explaining how they work, and you can still understand them just fine in romaji. I put the hyphens above to mark a place where you could think that the verb ends and the common conjugation forms end, and you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the “tricks”—but some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out (are you familiar with miru -> miyou conjugation, or miru -> mirareru?)

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#68

Post by csande17 »

danabramov wrote: post #50
csande17 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not totally sure this "stems and suffixes" mental model really works well for everything else. Forms like the imperative (食べろ), volitional (食べよう), provisional (食べれば), potential (食べられる), and causative (食べさせる) aren't cleanly handled either -- they work similarly for godan verbs, but you have to add a different suffix for ichidan verbs.

It's definitely useful to understand how "chi" and "tsu" fit into the hiragana chart, and if your asterisk notation helps you remember which verbs are ichidan vs godan then that's great, but I'm not sure it's worth trying to unify -masu and -nai into one model.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#69

Post by danabramov »

klodolph wrote: post #66
danabramov wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a deliberate choice in the article. I cover every single caveat with it explicitly. I also mention this: > (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.)

That note isn’t much to go on. I think the choice is not a good one, whether it is deliberate or by accident, it is not a good choice either way. The main caveat to Hepburn is that it’s unsuitable for explaining how Japanese works and it’s unsuitable for learning Japanese—so before you start working on verb conjugations, you pick up kana or one of the romanizations which is more aligned with Japanese. The idea that y…

I concede that using Nihon-shiki maybe would’ve been more elegant for what I tried to do in the article.

> But the article doesn’t make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.

Not at all. I give it two sections and then we move on. It doesn’t affect literally anything else on the page. You just learn to shift rows and move on. To make what points?

> you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the “tricks”—but some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out

I’m not quite sure what you mean to say in this part. I do cover -[r]eba and -[y]ou in the final section (“one more thing”) which extends the model to clearly handle that disappearing consonant. I think -[r]eru fits in there the same way, just as -[r]u itself.

I think explaining it as mi + [y]ou = miyou, but nom_ + [y]ou = nomou is a clearer way to think about this. The rule is that the hole burns down the leading consonant (but takes the vowel).

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#70

Post by naishoya »

59percentmore wrote: post #52

Te-form mnemonic (sung to Ba Ba Black Sheep): i chi ri tte bi mi ni nde ki ite gi ite shi shite

I learned this 35 years ago to the tune of Clementine, youre using black sheep, my spouse uses another tune, but what funny is I learned it not with the 'i' endings, but with the dictionary form (sometimes called base-3) 'u' forms.

u tsu ru tte bu mu nu nde ku ite, gu ite

without the shi shite as that had been learned well ahead of the lesson adding ta/te forms.

I just think it's interesting how readily a little ditty tune helps people with recall, regardless of the actual tune.

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