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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

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Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#151

Post by danabramov »

lmm wrote: post #88
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.

I started learning a couple of months ago (with a couple of false starts before). What level am I supposed to be at by this point? This is so incredibly condescending I don’t even know what to say.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#152

Post by danabramov »

raincole wrote: post #124
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 is a quite weird article. It opens with several paragraphs about romaji, implying the target audience are not familiar with romaji/kana already. But it's way, way too early for such a reader to worry about verb conjugation.

I wanted to write a weird article! My whole shtick here is that learning conjugation is completely orthogonal to learning most of the language, and you can frontload it into a single evening like this. I don’t respect the whole “it’s too early to do X” dogmas in learning and teaching, and I trust some of my readers will find useful what I find useful.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#153

Post by danabramov »

charcircuit wrote: post #101
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...

I’m just describing my experience learning. I understand that some compressed explanations match it, and I agree this one is good! This is not the explanation I was exposed to when trying to learn it the first time.

So you agree my explanation is correct (but unnecessarily longwinded and builds a strawman)? I’ll take that.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#154

Post by danabramov »

presentation wrote: post #109
danabramov wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

I’d normally be with you and I call this out as a concern purists would have my article. I’m doing something differently here and maybe more daring — the conceit of this article is that you can learn the entire system in one evening with no prior knowledge of Japanese at all. In that case I think the “s_ + i = shi” is as fine a pedagogical moment as any to introduce why the hiragana table matters. And for readers who already know it, I assume they won’t actually have a problem following the content, setting aside the pedantism and the annoyance at someone seemingly “teaching in English” and “copypasting concepts”. Like I get what you’re saying, I just think that it’s okay to break the rules for what I’m going for here.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#155

Post by vessenes »

Wow, there is a lot of negative gatekeeping on learning Japanese in this thread. I recommend people chill out.

Dan, this is cool, and I can tell you enjoyed writing this up and thinking it through as you wrote. Don’t let the haters get you down.

I think you’d like Orbit (withorbit.com), a tool that got built out of some experimental learning work I think originally done at quantum.country — it’s intended as a sort of toolkit to help turn blog content into spaced repitition inline memorization tools.

Check it out! I think the post would benefit from something like this - it’s fun for most to play with seeing how they are understanding this, and you spend a lot of time trying to create a bit of interactive reading/thinking in the blog.

Keep writing, please, it’s good.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#156

Post by teye »

danabramov wrote: post #144
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) > > i…

Where does the commenter say it was only a glance? I share the feeling.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#157

Post by throwaway27448 »

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…

> Learning Japanese is about learning a new way of thinking and structuring your thoughts.

I suspect this is true with most languages that are not in the same language family. The indoeuropean languages are all pretty similarly structured (don't @ me for not knowing the eighteenth tense of lithuanian), but it still takes time and effort for an english speaker to think in french, even if for the most part concepts translate directly. But bantu languages, eg kirundi or zulu, lean heavily on verbs with an entirely different conception of sentence structure and morphology, where you can stick entire clauses into one word, and you realize that your brain is picking up on patterns to decipher grammar that wouldn't make much sense in indoeuropean languages like dahl's law (except apparently in greek and sanskrit, where it's called grassman's law? Huh... now I know). Hausa is different still where you need to think about tense in an entirely different way—the pronoun is conjugated and the verb remains unchanged, and sometimes it feels like there are more irregular words than regular. Mandarin is beautiful, and actually quite simple to speak a little conversationally, if probably as difficult as english (or maybe more so) to master.

Learning foreign languages really makes you realize how central language is to basic cognition. You see the world in a different way, with different values and relations, depending on which language you speak/think in.

Ironically, I think this makes people extra susceptible to thinking that chatbots are intelligent (or even conscious, mr dawkins), even though it fails basic tests of memory and learning necessary to convincingly mimic understanding of, idk, time passing. Or motivation. Or emotion. But you can tell when it's awkwardly translating from another language in a way that a human would likely catch quite quickly if exposed to billions of documents.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#158

Post by wren6991 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #64
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.

Thanks, this was news to me. TIL.

I wasn't really going for kunreishiki, more ワープロ, aka "whatever is the least typing to make the desired characters appear".

I think typing in IME is how most people actually interact day-to-day with romaji, and I lex "si" and "shi" identically because the difference is usually not important.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#159

Post by danabramov »

adrian_b wrote: post #131
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 problem is that your explanation confuses phonemes with letters. A spoken language is described by decomposing the spoken words into phonemes, where phonemes are sounds that distinguish words, in the sense that replacing one phoneme in a word with another phoneme will produce a different word. While ideally each phoneme should be recognized by a distinct pronunciation, in the majority of the languages of the worl…

I get that. I’ve compressed this as an aside in an article about something else. It’s a choice; like an article about React could spend a bit of time on arrow functions vs function declarations as a choice. Or even let/var. It all depends on audience’s prerequisite knowledge and what you choose to assume.

I strongly suspect that if I were using Kunrei-shiki, there would be just as many comments here saying my article is wrong because “si” is pronounced closer to English “shi”, but my article makes it seem like it doesn’t — so this is why you should learn kana bla bla bla.

I assume my reader (1) has zero prerequisites and (2) wants words to sound correctly while seeing them the first time. Those are the constraints that motivated my approach. You could argue that it’s a strange set of constraints to pick when teaching but I wanted it to be fun.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#160

Post by purpleflashing »

I wonder what the author’s native language is as they seem to struggle with the concept of alternation.

For me, the first half of the article could be removed and the learning could simply start with “there are two types of verbs in Japanese (+ some irregular verbs), one type conjugates without alternation in the root, the other with”. That’s enough to get the mental model but my native languages have alternation to begin with so it’s an intuitive concept.

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