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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

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Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#101

Post by charcircuit »

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…

Because the whole article is built upon a straw man (it's not usually taught the way he claims) and the "method" is just a normal explanation (see this section on wikipedia).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_conjugation#Verb_grou...

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#102

Post by EdiX »

kazinator wrote: post #100
monadgonad wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 。。。

煽る is a godan verb, consistent with your example conjugations (if it was ichidan it would be 煽た、煽たい, etc)

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#103

Post by dayjaby »

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…

The article could just be two words: ichidan, godan. Done.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#104

Post by thaumasiotes »

musicale wrote: post #61
danabramov wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> while in kanji it would have been "Muranara"

Not quite. If you change the order of some kanji, the general case is that the resulting text has no definite pronunciation. You definitely would not expect that the sounds assigned to the kanji in one ordering would be the same ones assigned in a new ordering.

This is a phenomenon the Japanese sometimes play with. In the novel Musashi, Musashi comes up with that name by reinterpreting the characters of his actual name (which, in the novel, is Takezō).

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#105

Post by eloisant »

danabramov wrote: post #40
qingcharles wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Especially how easy it is honestly to learn hiragana. You can practically learn it in a day and keep a table next to you to look up every time you forget one. If you're at the point you're learning verbs you'd be mad not to know how to read some kana.

I explicitly address my reason for choosing it over kana in the article. If you disagree, please engage with the argument that’s already there.

The benefit you give (be able to "cut" a kana in the middle) is really weak, I've never seen anyone being confused by that when learning in kana.

This is completely nullified by all the drawbacks of using romaji while learning and they're well known already.

The only reason to use romaji for Japanese grammar is to explain the concepts to someone who has no interest in learning the language, just for their general knowledge.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#106

Post by thaumasiotes »

kazinator wrote: post #96

"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.

> 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

That's how all conjugation schemes work. There's nothing weird about this. Stems aren't supposed to exist in the spoken language. But they are observable in the spoken language.

Compare how a modern dictionary will give you ποιέω, a full and fully-inflected word which doesn't actually exist in ancient Greek, as the first principle part of that verb. This is done because the stem of the verb is ποιε-, and the epsilon ending the stem can be easily observed by its effect on most of the conjugational endings. It doesn't happen to affect the first-person singular ending -ω (to be precise, the contraction of ε- with -ω is -ω), so the dictionary form is synthetic, chosen to be informative.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#107

Post by jaggederest »

lmm wrote: post #95
jaggederest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"As a result, the sequences [ti si di (d)zi] do not occur in native or Sino-Japanese vocabulary."[1] Unless I'm missing something, Japanese phonology doesn't include the sound english has as "si", only "shi"? I'm not a native speaker though, it's entirely possible that I am missing something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#108

Post by csande17 »

EdiX wrote: post #102
kazinator wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 。。。

煽る is a godan verb, consistent with your example conjugations (if it was ichidan it would be 煽た、煽たい, etc)

I used to get these terms mixed up all the time because some textbooks use "Group 1" and "Group 2" to refer to these verbs, but Group 1 doesn't mean ichidan.

For all that I'm not totally sold on this article's idea of "stems" and "suffixes", I think it does a good job of avoiding this pitfall and correctly explaining the groups.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#109

Post by presentation »

danabramov wrote: post #76
wzdd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Factual mistake" is a bit harsh, but the missing piece is that there are multiple ways to romanise Japanese; all of them produce "valid Romaji" but only in the particular system being used. Si is how you write し in romaji using the kunrei-shiki romanisation. In the Hepburn romanisation it's shi. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#Diffe... .

I see, maybe my use of “romaji” is sloppy because I implied “Hepburn romaji” specifically because that’s what I chose in the article. I do explicitly mention that other romanizations exist and that I chose not to use them — so I’m not worried about misleading someone who reads the article. But on pedantic level I see why “si doesn’t exist” sounds overly broad.

I think also that anyone who's spoken Japanese for a while already has internalized that "si" === "shi" because there literally isn't the sound "si" in modern Japanese, as the other commenters mentioned it's often romanized both as "si" and "shi" in daily life, if you typed "si" into a keyboard it renders し, it goes on. The original comment on this thread includes one such person who literally didn't follow why "si" is wrong, and I felt the same way too as a long-time Japanese learner. It's a very "copy paste Western language concepts onto Japanese" way of conceptualizing the language, which is IMO a great way to set oneself up for great struggles when trying to learn a language that is structurally different, because it's not the right mental model.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#110

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

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.

Japanese language learning environments really are ridiculously hostile and I've stopped engaging with them unless im searching for a specific resource.

I've dabbled a bit in Mandarin and while eventually i ended up liking Japanese more as a language, the Mandarin language learner community felt like such a warm bath in comparison. The people were friendly and welcoming and willing to help and genuinely excited to find more people wanting to learn the language.

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