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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

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Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#91

Post by lmm »

danabramov wrote: post #44
lmm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article.

Nope. You correct yourself after, sure, but what I wrote is how it came across at the time when reading.

> Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji

No, that's not what "romaji" means. If you mean Hepburn, say Hepburn. And if you don't know the difference, that's a sign to learn more before presuming to teach others.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#92

Post by lmm »

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…

> 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.

"Romaji" does not (in English) mean "romanisation", as most people who've studied Japanese to at least beginner level know.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#93

Post by lmm »

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.

Theorycrafting efficient ways of learning Japanese while being barely conversational yourself is a completely different hobby from actually learning Japanese (or actually studying the teaching of Japanese), and sadly in online spaces the former often swamps out discussion of the latter.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#94

Post by klodolph »

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…

> In general, I find your attitude a bit condescending.

Yeah—I can understand why I’d come across as condescending. There’s a balance here—I want to be clear when I say that I have problems with the article, but I don’t want to be hurtful and I don’t want to make criticisms that are not supported by the text.

Rather than defend my comments as “correct” let’s say that I failed in my goals of not coming across as condescending. The reason I want to frame it this way is that similarly, I think the article failed in its goals as coming across (to me) as “look at this neat thing about Japanese”.

It is just kind of the nature of written communication that it takes a lot of editing and polish to make it clear, correct, and concise. I had the good fortune to sign up for Japanese 101 when my professor was in the middle of writing a new Japanese textbook—it was pretty exciting, with the changing lesson plans, the flock of master’s students hanging around, revisions and drafts to teaching materials, and those endless hours of classroom observation. The teachers occasionally gave us a “peek behind the curtain” and explained why they chose to teach things a certain way or another. I’ve rarely gotten that kind of explanation in any class that I’ve taken so I thought it was pretty special.

I don’t expect you to put in the textbook-level of polish into your article but there is a kind of verbosity (the article is long, which makes it kind of hard to respond to because there is just so much to sift through), there are some problems with clarity (the issue of romanization and orthography is mixed in with the conjugation, and maybe it would be better to separate those issues) some problems with correctness (various) and some problems with completeness (the patterns omit some conjugations that I think you don’t know, and I don’t think they follow the pattern).

I have certainly put effort into articles that have gotten brutal negative feedback; I think it was right for me to write the article, and then feel like shit from the feedback, and then maybe retract and revise it. If there is one actual error here, a true error, I think the error is fighting out criticism in the HN comments.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#95

Post by lmm »

jaggederest wrote: post #27
BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #16

Up until just last year "si" "ti' and "tu" were the proper official way to romanize "shi" "chi" and "tsu": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunrei-shiki

And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english. Complaining that there's no english equivalent of the russian (взгляд / vzglyad)'s initial cluster would be similar in feel - no english words use it, so the romanization can be whatever you like, really.

> And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english.

Erm, wtf? The English "si" sound does exist and sounds different from し. There is a reason people don't want to write Sinzyuku, and while I think they're making the wrong tradeoff, it is a tradeoff and should be acknowledged as such.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#96

Post by kazinator »

"hanasimasu" is not exactly wrong; there is a romanization system in which "si" is how you write "shi".

If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language, it behooves you to adopt "si" and "ti", because they bring in a consistency needed by such a system to be complete.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#97

Post by klodolph »

danabramov wrote: post #89
danabramov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

I understand why you wrote the article this way, I think the lesson here is “we have learned why Japanese textbooks do not teach the content in this order” and there are a couple reasons why this order is not good:

1. It relies on people not understanding certain things. In general, you cannot expect people to have exactly the right misunderstanding necessary for a lesson.

2. Spending extra time with Hepburn reinforces it, and it shouldn’t be reinforced.

I am in general extremely skeptical of lessons which try to engineer a way for the students to make mistakes. What I have seen in real classrooms and in informal teaching is that the mistakes are habit-forming and the outcomes of this kind of engineering are unpredictable.

Mistakes are appealing to the developers on HN because we understand things more by seeing them fail. But this does not mean that you can engineer somebody to experience the same moment of enlightenment that you did, because it requires constructing the same (incorrect) mental model that you had when you made that mistake that led to useful insight, and it both difficult and counterproductive to try and make that happen to students. Give people the best chances to learn by giving them the best chances to avoid mistakes, and the mistakes and insight will happen organically on their own, in unique ways for each student.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#98

Post by kazinator »

Funny how some conjugated forms of verbs collide with dictionary forms of other verbs (esp. if we ignore pitch accent differences):

E.g. potential of 買う (kau, to buy) is 買える (kaeru), which is spelled like 帰る (kaeru, to return home).

It reminds of you how "lay" is a verb (to put something into a flat resting position, but is also the past tense of "to lie" (take on a supine position).

Today, I lay bricks; yesterday I lay in bed all day.

Plus lie and lie are examples of how English verbs can be homonyms in dictionary form, but conjugate differently, something we see in Japanese (either actual homonyms or near homonyms modulo pitch accent).

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#99

Post by TonyStr »

danabramov wrote: post #42
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.…

Honestly, you don't need to "learn" or "understand" much grammar explicitly. I think it definitely helps get you off your feet, as you can "decode" sentences if you remember grammar rules, but eventually the grammar has to be internalized anyway. This happens when you are repeatedly exposed to the same patterns in context. I don't know how English or Norwegian grammar works, and I'm fluent in those. I skipped grammar in Japanese and focused on reading, yet I can understand most things and I can tell when something sounds wrong.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#100

Post by kazinator »

monadgonad wrote: post #87
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…

E.g:

> not so lucky and got a "ru" ending? check what vowel before the "ru". it it's one of -aru, -oru, -uru, then it's also a godan verb.

Wrong: 煽る (aoru) is ichidan: 煽った、煽りたい、煽らない、煽ろう、煽られる 。。。

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