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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

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Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#181

Post by danabramov »

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…

> 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)

The conceit of the article is that it doesn’t teach any meanings, it just teaches “how to append a suffix to a stem”. If this much is obvious to you, that’s fine, the article isn’t useful to you. It was difficult for me to understand ichidan/godan.

The article does not attempt to explain how to pick the suffix or what those suffixes mean.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#182

Post by danabramov »

tpoacher wrote: post #133

A plug for my favourite book here. Richard Webb's 80/20 Japanese covers these topics extremely well, and in a very logical / productive order for a foreign speaker. (and it comes with very enjoyable audio tapes and anki cards to boot) Highly recommended.

I also really liked the stuff I’ve seen from 80/20! It might have the best explanation of sentence structure that I’ve seen so far.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#183

Post by danabramov »

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.

The linguistic article I linked to at the bottom directly deals with that so I invite you to check it out. Yes, romaji with a color-coded hole may be a plebe’s choice to render the stem, but the stem itself is a reality of the spoken language and how it evolved, whatever way we choose to render it.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#184

Post by danabramov »

stratocumulus0 wrote: post #169
danabramov wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not claiming any of those.

Ah, I see your point. I agree 100% that a system doesn’t help you get fluent, and you need to mix all kinds of activities, most of all including actually using the language to form thoughts and respond to thoughts in realtime. I didn’t mean anywhere in the article that a system like this is a replacement for these activities. I’m only saying that I find it helpful to understand how to connect a suffix to a stem from the first principles for when I forget that. I also find it illuminating to look at the linguistic system and how “nice” Japanese actually is (compared to my native language which is super messy). That’s why I wrote the article.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#185

Post by lynguist »

https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerun...

Scroll down to Gelernte Sprachen (=Languages being learned).

The data of the Swiss Federal Bureau of Statistics confirms that among languages currently being learned among the residents of Switzerland Japanese comes at 7th rank!

It is actively being studied by every 40th person above 25!

Everyone is a weeaboo!

The ranks are: 1 English (lingua franca of the world) 2 German (administrative language of most of Switzerland) 3 French (administrative language of 1/4 of Switzerland) 4 Italian (big minority language) 5 Spanish (first language with no direct connection to Switzerland) 6 Swiss German (oral language of most of Switzerland) 7 Japanese (everyone is a weeaboo) 8 Portuguese (another language with no direct connection to Switzerland)

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#186

Post by adrian_b »

danabramov wrote: post #63
klodolph wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The systems are obviously not isomorphic—Japanese kana are not entirely phonetic (they are just mostly so) and the different romanization systems choose differently whether to follow orthography or phonetics more closely. > hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!) I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible. Like, if I don’t understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just…

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…

Because of this incomplete bijectivity, some applications, e.g. dictionaries, use a modified Hepburn system, which is bijective, e.g. by using "dzu" and "zu", instead of Hepburn "zu" (and "dji" and "ji").

Hiragana also has its problems, because the hiragana used before WWII corresponded with an ancient pronunciation of Japanese, from many centuries ago, which no longer matched the modern Japanese pronunciation.

After WWII, under the American occupation, there was a reform of the writing system, which replaced many kanji used before WWII and it also changed the spelling in hiragana of many words.

In general the modern hiragana spelling has been changed to match the modern pronunciation, but there are a few survivals of the older spelling that lead to inconsistencies.

As an example, the hiragana syllable now romanized as "ha" was pronounced for some time several centuries ago as "fa-" in initial syllables and as "-va-" in internal syllables. Then the pronunciation shifted to "ha-" in initial syllables and to "-wa-" in internal syllables. After WWII the "ha" hiragana character was replaced by the "wa" character in most internal syllables, to match the new pronunciation, except in the "-wa" postposed particle, where the "ha" hiragana character was retained, despite the pronunciation. The particle is now romanized as "wa", so going backwards to hiragana would produce the wrong hiragana character, another example of non-bijectivity, besides "zu" and "ji". Yet another non-bijectivity example is that the postposed particle normally romanized as "-o" actually uses the hiragana character "wo".

The changes in hiragana spelling after WWII are also responsible for the fact that many Japanese words reproduced in old books written in English, e.g. from the 19th century, appear quite different from how they are written today in the modern Hepburn romanization.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#187

Post by klodolph »

danabramov wrote: post #140
klodolph wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reinforc…

Okay I see where you’re coming from, sure. We assume different things about the reader and the context of the article. This is an article for people like me who like this approach — maybe engineers or people with an engineering mindset. I also genuinely think it’s not that deep and that there’s no complex mistake being engineered here. I don’t believe you that the “mistake” of “sa with a replaced by i must be si” is…

I also don't think this is especially deep—that I think this approach to teaching verb conjugation is a bad approach and I don’t think there is this much to say about it.

People off the street are obviously not learning Japanese verb conjugations in isolation. If they are learning it at all, they probably have some broader goals involving spoken or written fluency, and these people are gonna fire up DuoLingo or sign up for a class or something. Japanese verb conjugations are simple and easy to learn but they are usually not taught day 1, and you are not expected to learn the whole table at once, but one or two conjugations at a time along with practice using that conjugation.

So if the pitch is, “this system works for teaching English speakers off the street how to conjugate verbs in Japanese” it seems to me like the goal is a little artificial and maybe not representative.

I think the call to “engineering mindset” may be illuminative, because engineers are likely to have unwarranted confidence in fields outside of their expertise. Engineers in practice often think that they can use engineering skills (broadly speaking) to solve education problems, learn foreign languages, or solve social problems. The phenomenon is sometimes called “engineer’s disease” or “engineer’s syndrome”. What I wonder is whether there is something about engineering mindset that is counterproductive outside of engineering fields—this seems plausible, because it explains why we don’t just teach everyone to use an engineering mindset.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#188

Post by danabramov »

zerof1l wrote: post #176
danabramov wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I like Cure Dolly. I’m actually surprised you bring her up because she gets a lot of purist haters too. I’ve found this lesson difficult to digest when I tried her approach. It’s actually where I fell off and lost the interest the first time I tried to learn the language. The comparable lesson is primarily https://kellenok.github.io/cure-script/7-5-conjugation.html , not the one you quoted. I prefer teaching it…

So this whole thing is about romaji… Judging from your article and the comments you've been writing, you have strong feelings about it. Okay, you don't need kana to understand verb conjugation… But what you've already encountered is that everyone keeps insisting you should learn kana as soon as possible and avoid using romaji. I'm not gonna write an essay on why that is, but if you're serious about learning Japanese,…

I don't actually disagree that you should learn kana early. I just didn't want it to "block" the article because I genuinely believe learning kana can be done in parallel with understanding verb conjugation. There is no hard dependency between them at all. I particularly like that it unlocks the visualization of swapping in the vowel which kana obscures. And I like that the article is understandable to a reader with zero knowledge. That motivates the choice.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#189

Post by danabramov »

klodolph wrote: post #187
danabramov wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay I see where you’re coming from, sure. We assume different things about the reader and the context of the article. This is an article for people like me who like this approach — maybe engineers or people with an engineering mindset. I also genuinely think it’s not that deep and that there’s no complex mistake being engineered here. I don’t believe you that the “mistake” of “sa with a replaced by i must be si” is…

I also don't think this is especially deep—that I think this approach to teaching verb conjugation is a bad approach and I don’t think there is this much to say about it. People off the street are obviously not learning Japanese verb conjugations in isolation. If they are learning it at all, they probably have some broader goals involving spoken or written fluency, and these people are gonna fire up DuoLingo or sign…

>So if the pitch is, “this system works for teaching English speakers off the street how to conjugate verbs in Japanese” it seems to me like the goal is a little artificial and maybe not representative.

I never claimed it's representative of anything. I said this is the explanation I wish I (me, personally!) were given, and I wrote it for people like me. I appreciate unorthodox explanations as a genre. As long as they're rigorously correct (again, you're welcome to point out factual mistakes), I like experiments like "learn a non-trivial part of the language with no prerequisites as a syntactic transformation in one evening". For many languages, including my native language, this is literally impossible! But for Japanese, it works. Maybe that sort of explanation is not to your taste, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve being written. The rest of your comment reads kinda ad hominem.

From what I can tell, my engineering-brained explanation is consistent with how a linguist would explain it (aside from choices in presentation like romaji). That's good enough for me.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#190

Post by purpleflashing »

danabramov wrote: post #178
purpleflashing wrote: post #160

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…

My native language does have alternation but I don’t want to assume its knowledge so I show it visually. Also, alternation doesn’t always work the same way. In Japanese it’s decided by the suffix but that doesn’t need to be the case. But yes, I am basically describing alternation.

You don’t explain conjunction in such details as as well and it is not universally present feature in all the languages though.

Writing about learning languages is tricky because you cannot write for a universal audience, you have to write for speakers of a particular language (I suppose English in this case, since the article is in English), you’re also lucky if you know whether they have ever learned any other foreign language, and what particular education system they’re coming from (some education systems teach basics of linguistics and its terminology, some don’t — a language teacher might find themselves having a class full of people who have never learned what a clause, subject, object, or conjunction are, who don’t have the mental model to operate with these categories).

I don’t speak any Japanese and your explanation was understandable to me (even if there were some redundancies) but I think the negative reaction in the comments is just because of mismatch of your mental model of a language and people’s mental models.

I understand you were writing about your own process of filling the gaps (btw, I also find it easier, or at least more fun, to understand the basics of grammar before memorizing all the specific forms), but I think it’s not very clear from the article as some in the comments seemed to expect to learn from it, rather than learn about how you solved a particular obstacle in your learning.

I hope I am not coming off as bashing you or your writing. I now regret writing my original comment now that I read all the other replies — it looks like I am your work calling the article redundant, I am sorry for that. I hope you continue writing about your learning path — language learning is fascinating, and the more information we share about how we learn, the easier it is for everyone. And Japanese is a very beautiful language! Kudos to you for tackling it.

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