Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way • Hacker News Board

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#81

Post by danabramov » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:02 AM UTC

csande17 wrote: post #72

danabramov wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. They are cleanly handled in the final section (“one more thing”) that introduces a notion of disappearing consonant like -[r]u, -[r]eba and so on, and gives a rule for it. This…

"Disappearing consonant" doesn't work for the potential form, unless you expand the representation to allow writing -[rar]eru. (Edit: And I think imperative would require like "-[ro](e)".) Which, like, is clean in the sense that Redux is technically Turing-complete (you can encompass _any_ difference between two strings by saying that one string uses the stuff in brackets and the other string uses the stuff in parent…

Okay, that one’s fair! I remember there was also some other one that had it split into two completely different suffixes.

My answer to this is that by the time you’re learning those, you’re already so fluent in conjugation that a couple of special cases will layer on fine. It’s way better then you get in most languages. (And pedantically I’d still say [] works for the cases above, as you’ve shown.)

I honestly don’t understand the cynicism here. If I could read this article when I started learning, it would’ve saved me a ton of time. That’s why I wrote it. I hope it’ll be useful to someone else but it’s fine if not. As an educator I’m proud of how much it crams in that’s usually spread over many weeks, and how the simple model almost perfectly generalizes. But yeah sure it’s making some unorthodox choices and leaves a couple of advanced cases within one indirection. I’m still very happy with it.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#82

Post by mc3301 » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:13 AM UTC

holistio wrote: post #5

mc3301 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like to do deep dives like this not to memorise but to understand deeper layers, the spirit of the language, the way it moves, the way it unfolds.

By all means, it is fun to play with a language. And every person's brain works differently.

I like to use this metaphor, though. You're hiking a mountain, this journey to the "peak" is reaching some goal of fluency.

It's fun to stop and look at rocks, examining, comparing and whatnot. But it doesn't necessarily get you closer to the peak. I mean, it might, because you'll better understand your footing every-so-slightly. Not a perfect metaphor.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#83

Post by danabramov » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:13 AM UTC

famahar wrote: post #77

The comments to this article are another example of something I see so often in Japanese language learning dicussions I see online. It's always filled with debate, disagreement, arguements over incredible subtle things, and everyone trying to optimize the best method. It can be really discouraging space for early learners.

Author here — it’s a really fun, elegant, and beautiful language. I highly recommend it if you’re interested. Maybe controversial but I think you can largely ignore the Japanese-learning community if/when the vibe isn’t right.

Mostly it helps to find learning resources that gel with your style of learning, and if possible, a tutor so you have a roadmap and more motivation. I found mine on italki. I also find Claude very helpful for sentence drills based on words and grammar I know.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#84

Post by danabramov » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:24 AM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #79

danabramov wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> 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 think that’s a long wait; I don’t want to rely too heavily on analogies but it is like teaching somebody arithmetic roman numerals and then explain…

I genuinely haven’t thought about zu/ji here (conceded!) It’s not relevant to conjugation though.

In general, I find your attitude a bit condescending. This is what I wrote about my choice:

> 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

My main mistake seems to be meaning “[Hepburn] romaji” by writing “romaji”. I was obviously aware of other systems because that is what the sentence says but I thought it’s acceptable to refer to Hepburn as just “romaji” as a sort of the default one. Maybe that’s wrong.

Other than this terminology nit, I think I’ve made myself quite clear there. I genuinely don’t think it’s a big deal. Maybe I overestimate my readers’ intelligence but I don’t find this difficult to live with at all once you get it.

Roman numerals is a funny parallel but it doesn’t hold very well. The difficulty of using Hepburn is O(1) shortcut: for conjugation, you only have to “remember” three special cases and they’re always applied just-in-time. It’s just substitutions — and are arguably inherent phonetically. Arithmetic with Roman numerals requires many stacked adjustments where you have to match pairs of things. And lack of orders really screws with ability to do multiplication. This just isn’t an intellectually honest comparison.

Re: your last point I actually kind of agree. I’m that annoying student who likes to un-extrapolate backwards from examples to the rules, knowing which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, after which I can go back to examples. My article is for people like me. Maybe there’s a few more of them.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#85

Post by klodolph » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:35 AM UTC

famahar wrote: post #77

The comments to this article are another example of something I see so often in Japanese language learning dicussions I see online. It's always filled with debate, disagreement, arguements over incredible subtle things, and everyone trying to optimize the best method. It can be really discouraging space for early learners.

The online spaces can be really discouraging, true—but it can also be really discouraging to be in a classroom or in a foreign country, struggling to use a language you barely know. Meanwhile, there are also a lot of ways to spend effort trying to learn a language without gaining mastery. Truly frustrating.

If you want some decent level of fluency then there is something you have to do, which is to communicate with other people in context and with specific goals in mind (get information, give information, make a request, etc). Whatever you can do to arrange for that to happen is probably more valuable than anything you can do online or with books. I personally like to recommend finding classes at a local college.

If you can’t get that, then I think the next best thing is reading and listening.

Drills are also necessary but you can easily fill your time with drills without advancing your ability to communicate or understand people.

There is plenty of research about what is / is not effective when it comes to learning languages so I encourage people to at least take a look at the results of that research rather than just go with whatever people recommend online (I’m just some random person online, I may be no better than the next). AI tools reportedly have a positive effect but they are not nearly as good as human interaction.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#86

Post by danabramov » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:43 AM UTC

valzevul wrote: post #80

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. 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 oft…

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.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#87

Post by monadgonad » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 5:52 AM UTC

valzevul wrote: post #80

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. 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 oft…

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.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#88

Post by lmm » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:00 AM UTC

valzevul wrote: post #80

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. 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 oft…

> 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.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#89

Post by danabramov » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:01 AM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #84

klodolph wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think that’s a long wait; I don’t want to rely too heavily on analogies but it is like teaching somebody arithmetic roman numerals and then explain…

I genuinely haven’t thought about zu/ji here (conceded!) It’s not relevant to conjugation though. In general, I find your attitude a bit condescending. This is what I wrote about my choice: > 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 h…

Actually let me just try to explain my pedagogical approach and philosophy here. Maybe that makes it clearer.

I assume no prerequisites at first. So my reader has never seen a kana table and doesn’t know which syllables exist.

I choose to teach conjugation first. That’s an unorthodox choice but I like it! That’s what I set out to do. So we get far enough until it breaks down. And it breaks down when a rule (which worked so far) doesn’t help with “s” because saying “si” would sound wrong.

That’s the moment I use to teach kana table and its importance. This “you made a mistake” is a pedagogical vehicle for introducing kana rows. And we go over the exact ones that you’d make a mistake with. So each special case is walked through.

At this point we could discard Hepburn but I choose to keep going because if you know special cases, there’s no issue. And at some point you’ll learn kana anyway.

So that’s how I chose to layer it. Maybe it’s a bit unholy but I like it. It is definitely self-consistent.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#90

Post by lmm » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:13 AM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #36

lmm wrote: post #19

If it's taking you this much effort to do the trivial conjugations (seriously, the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down, and falls back on "yeah, you just have to memorize the patterns" for た/て forms), yeah, just memorise them. Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you; you actually just h…

Author here. Strong disagree. I prefer having a system to simply memorizing. I don’t know what you mean by “so much effort”. I am literally just describing the system as it is brick by brick. If you see an opportunity to simplify, you’re welcome to provide a specific suggestion. I find this system rather elegant, and I tried to build it piece by piece because that’s my preferred way both to learn and to teach. >the w…

> I don’t know what you mean by “so much effort”.

This is a pretty long blog post covering really not very much.

> The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I don’t consider it more “interesting” and I’d argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise.

It's not just te/ta, you don't mention anything other than the basic polite/casual, positive/negative, and desiderative. At the very end you point to conditional and causative but say you haven't studied them, and no mention at all of passive, imperative, causative passive, or volitional.

> I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if there’s a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it.

And how's that working out for you?

> There’s literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I don’t understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.

I find it very presumptive to propose to "teach" what you haven't really learnt. How many people have successfully become remotely close to fluent following this approach? It's 0, right? What makes you think you're "teaching" rather than leading people astray?