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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

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Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#141

Post by danabramov »

iainmerrick wrote: post #129
danabramov wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Feels like the only person on this page who gets what I was going for.

I'm a bit dismayed by all the negativity you're getting. Thanks for all your level-headed and detailed responses here. I have a hard time understanding why people object to this kind of attempt to systematize something that conventionally relies on rote learning. I've always found that figuring out the underlying rules helps with the rote learning . When you see some new word or conjugation, it's super helpful to hav…

FWIW I actually haven’t seen negative feedback from the native speakers I’ve shared it with. (Maybe they didn’t want to upset me! I don’t know :)

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#142

Post by danabramov »

ponorin wrote: post #121
danabramov wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”. That is exactly the problem. Japanese doesn't distinguish between 'shi' and 'si', so all you're really gaining by pointing that out is learning how to correctly romanize Japanese, in a single system. Instead of learning the language you're learning how to represent the language in a foreign way. The rule 0 of learning a language is t…

I am literally saying in the article:

> this is actually completely intentional. some purists may dislike that, but [..] i think it provides a much clearer intuition for Japanese verb conjugation than writing it in hiragana.

You are that purist that I’m talking about. I get your argument. I just think it’s a non-issue in my chosen pedagogical approach to convey what I wanted to move on. People unaware of how romanization works will nod at it and move on. People aware of it will not have issue with it. People with opinions about proper way to teach the language are the ones that will get stuck on this.

The article is engineer-brained. It’s for people like me. It’s not for the people you’re teaching, assuming these strong opinions come from you being a teacher.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#143

Post by agnishom »

arunix wrote: post #139
zerof1l wrote: post #130

Don’t want to sound negative, just want to share my observations as someone who’s been actively learning Japanese for a couple of years. I much prefer how Japanese people actually teach verbs: 一段 (ichidan), literally "1-step"; 五段 (godan), literally "5 steps", plus a few exceptions sometimes called irregular verbs. It's not hard; it makes sense, just some textbooks (e.g. Genki) teach it really bad. Learning Japanese i…

Are there any books you'd recommend that get it right?

How about kellenok.github.io/cure-script/

But actually, I prefer the app "human japanese"

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#144

Post by danabramov »

zerof1l wrote: post #130

Don’t want to sound negative, just want to share my observations as someone who’s been actively learning Japanese for a couple of years. I much prefer how Japanese people actually teach verbs: 一段 (ichidan), literally "1-step"; 五段 (godan), literally "5 steps", plus a few exceptions sometimes called irregular verbs. It's not hard; it makes sense, just some textbooks (e.g. Genki) teach it really bad. Learning Japanese i…

> I much prefer how Japanese people actually teach verbs: 一段 (ichidan), literally "1-step"; 五段 (godan), literally "5 steps", plus a few exceptions sometimes called irregular verbs

This is literally what I teach in the article, including these translations. Quoting it:

> in ichidan ("one-row") verbs like taberu, the last syllable of the stem is fixed. it's always going to be be, no matter the suffix:

>

> (table)

>

> it stays on a single row in the hiragana table, hence "one-row".

>

>on the other hand, in godan ("five-row") verbs like nomu, the final syllable of the stem alternates between ma, mi, mu, me, and mo:

> (table)

> it spans all the five rows, which is why it's godan ("five-row"). the m* "wildcard" represents the entire ma/mi/mu/me/mo column.

You’re also mischaracterising my approach. I am not teaching to “think in English”. Quoting from the article:

> i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table. so this is a reminder to not think in romaji when you do calculations. when we conjugate godan verbs, we literally go up and down the column. (maybe all these textbooks that used hiragana had a point!)

If you have objections, please engage with the article’s actual content, not with what you assume it is based on a glance (“oh he’s using romaji, this is thinking in English”). I’m using romaji for specific reasons that are motivated and explained in text, and I show every single pitfall of that choice as well.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#145

Post by JuniperMesos »

naishoya wrote: post #70
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 ditt…

I've generally found this kind of thing annoying in my various attempts to learn languages - in one of my high school spanish classes the teacher thought it was important to have us learn a little song to memorize the six present tense forms of the to-be verb ser: (yo) soy, (tu) eres, (el/ella) es, (nosotros) somos, (vosotros) sois, (ellos/as) son. My thinking was, there's only six forms to memorize, and the verb is an incredibly common one ("to be"!) so they'll get constantly reinforced anyway. The song is silly and isn't really helping anyway.

I feel similarly about the transformations for the Japanese -te forms and -ta past tense marker. The entire system is:

Ichidan: add -te/ta to stem Godan: -u/ru/tsu -tte/tta -su -shite/shita -mu/bu/nu -nde/nda -ku -ite/ita -gu -ide/ida

So basically ten patterns which group into 5 subpatterns. There's some logic behind them - the -te and -ta morphemes originally got added to the -i/pre-masu/ren'youkei stem and then underwent some idiosyncratic consonant reductions in godan verbs. But, really, it's only ten patterns, you can just memorize them; and these are incredibly common verb forms that get used all the time so you'll have them reinforced frequently if you are at all engaging with the language. It's a lot less to memorize than if you were learning Ancient Greek or Sanskrit or something.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#146

Post by stratocumulus0 »

euroderf wrote: post #123
stratocumulus0 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of content is usually shared by people who are learning a language out of genuine interest for the first time. Most of the time it's Japanese because of the popularity manga and anime enjoy, and the challenge of learning a language that's so different from one's mother tongue. There are countless blog posts written by people to whom it "clicks" for the first time, and they excitedly run to their computer to…

> Mnemonics may work for some time, but in the end one won't be able to actually use the language if they don't learn it intuitively. A crutch can be cast away gradually. Finnish has two verbs, ottaa "take" and ostaa "buy". As a n00b I confused them all the time. So I decided that the "s" in ostaa was a dollar sign, and I used that quickly in conversation to select the right verb. And as I got quicker at it, it becam…

Yes, this is a valid point, mnemonics are totally valid when you are new to a concept.

I'm learning Turkish right now for example, and the dative forms for me/you (bana/sana) perfectly fit the accusative conjugation pattern in my native Polish. So my mnemonic is explicitly "the opposite of what you feel it is".

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#147

Post by agnishom »

sevenseacat wrote: post #135

As someone who is learning Japanese and is struggling through learning conjugations.... this is not explained simply to me. Maybe it's because I'm at a different part of my learning journey, but this seems to go on and on and on about godan v ichidan verbs but doesn't touch on the actual conjugation (ie. how to turn "drink" into "didn't want to drink"), nor on plain form (everything is in polite form), and te-form ge…

does this help? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGA6Tj9_lSg

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#148

Post by danabramov »

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…

How is this my headcanon when this is literally how it works linguistically? Please provide a counterexample.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#149

Post by iainmerrick »

danabramov wrote: post #141
iainmerrick wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit dismayed by all the negativity you're getting. Thanks for all your level-headed and detailed responses here. I have a hard time understanding why people object to this kind of attempt to systematize something that conventionally relies on rote learning. I've always found that figuring out the underlying rules helps with the rote learning . When you see some new word or conjugation, it's super helpful to hav…

FWIW I actually haven’t seen negative feedback from the native speakers I’ve shared it with. (Maybe they didn’t want to upset me! I don’t know :)

Well, the native speakers or otherwise self-diagnosed experts who felt obliged to chip in here!

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#150

Post by danabramov »

stratocumulus0 wrote: post #111
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…

This kind of content is usually shared by people who are learning a language out of genuine interest for the first time. Most of the time it's Japanese because of the popularity manga and anime enjoy, and the challenge of learning a language that's so different from one's mother tongue. There are countless blog posts written by people to whom it "clicks" for the first time, and they excitedly run to their computer to…

Please provide a counterexample if you think the article has a mistake or builds a system that doesn’t work.
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