Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way • Hacker News Board

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#191

Post by runarberg » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:16 PM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #148

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…

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

Linguistics are orthogonal to petagogy. Something can be sound linguistically but still an in optimal way to teach the same thing. If linguistics were all there was to language learning, we would all just get a grammar reference book and call it a day, but we all know that is a terrible way to learn a language.

Personally, as a beginner/early intermediate learner, what I have found works is just to allow my brain to learn this over time by reading and understanding more an more sentences. I used Genki and am aware that it thought this badly. But it was in the 3rd chapter and by the time I reached the 6th chapter I had gotten an intuitive idea anyway (とている just sounded wrong and I couldn't explain why). And I wasn't doing much output anyway so it didn't matter that I maybe confused a couple of verb endings as I recited the 2nd writing exercise og the 5th chapter of my textbook.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#192

Post by etrvic » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:20 PM UTC

While we are on the subject of Japanese and since everyone criticises the author, any resource recommendations or otherwise good practices to share with a fellow Japanese learner?

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#193

Post by danabramov » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:21 PM UTC

purpleflashing wrote: post #190

danabramov wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fore…

I don't mind some bashing but your comments actually read relatively warm to me — no worries about the tone. Re: expectations, it's a tricky thing. I think it's a bit unfair to say that this particular serialization of concepts can only serve as "me documenting my journey" and not "me teaching someone". Like, it's a bit presumptious to say that no one will actually learn from it. Maybe 45% find it incomprehensible, 40% find it overly verbose and obvious, and 5% find it the best thing ever that unlocks the understanding for them. That's kind of what I expect, honestly, and that's good enough for me. I'm genuinely proud of the pedagogical approach in this article. It's a bit "experimental", which is why I didn't put it on my main blog, but this is exactly how I'd want to be taught in the beginning. I assume others like me exist.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#194

Post by purpleflashing » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #193

purpleflashing wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fore…

I don't mind some bashing but your comments actually read relatively warm to me — no worries about the tone. Re: expectations, it's a tricky thing. I think it's a bit unfair to say that this particular serialization of concepts can only serve as "me documenting my journey" and not "me teaching someone". Like, it's a bit presumptious to say that no one will actually learn from it. Maybe 45% find it incomprehensible, 4…

Someone learning from your journey is not you teaching them.

Teaching is a very particular skillset and craft, especially teaching languages. It should be grounded in a teacher’s own experience learning something as it helps them to empathize with the learner but simply talking about how you learned something is not teaching.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#195

Post by alper » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #142

ponorin wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 romaniza…

It's unbelievable what lengths people will go to to hate on this. The article is good, I learned a bunch of stuff and was putting off verb conjugation for a while now.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#196

Post by deaton » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC

Really cool writeup. I personally like the Cure Dolly approach to conjugation, in which she said there was no such thing as conjugation (at least not in the Indo-European sense), only helper verbs and adjectives. Japanese grammar is just so difficult to understand as a native English speaker. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#197

Post by danabramov » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #90

danabramov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Strong disagree. I prefer having a system to simply memorizing. I don’t know what you mean by “so much effort”. I am literally just describing the system as it is brick by brick. If you see an opportunity to simplify, you’re welcome to provide a specific suggestion. I find this system rather elegant, and I tried to build it piece by piece because that’s my preferred way both to learn and to teach. >the w…

> I don’t know what you mean by “so much effort”. This is a pretty long blog post covering really not very much. > The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I don’t consider it more “interesting” and I’d argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise. It's not just te/ta, you don't mention anythin…

>This is a pretty long blog post covering really not very much.

Fine, it's too verbose for you. I like this pacing and level of verbosity for my own learning. I wrote it for people like me.

>At the very end you point to conditional and causative but say you haven't studied them, and no mention at all of passive, imperative, causative passive, or volitional.

I haven't studied them (as in "what they mean") but I've gone through all tables of "how they attach" as part of researching the article. Let's catalogue them:

- Conditional and casuative: Fully covered by the article's last section.

- Volitional: Same pattern. In article's notation, it's -[y]ou.

- Passive: Same pattern. In article's notation, it's -[r]areru.

- Causative passive: Same pattern. In article's notation, -[s]aserareru. (I guess there's a special case there for when it contracts.)

- Imperative: Genuinely two cases that IMO are easier to teach separately.

If something's actually wrong, please correct it! I think the article gives a genuinely good scaffolding. By the time you get to these advanced cases, you're comfortable enough with the base model to split them up.

>And how's that working out for you?

Can you stop with your condescending sneering? It's working out well for me.

>I find it very presumptive to propose to "teach" what you haven't really learnt.

I think the article is rigorous in the scope it tackles. If it's not, you would have pointed out the mistakes by now. I also think a beginner has full license to teach if they stay rigorous. It's just a market of approaches.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#198

Post by ivm » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #29

lmm wrote: post #19

If it's taking you this much effort to do the trivial conjugations (seriously, the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down, and falls back on "yeah, you just have to memorize the patterns" for た/て forms), yeah, just memorise them. Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you; you actually just h…

Indeed, especially for a language with forms of verb as regular as in Japanese. The whole language has two and a half irregular verbs. Compare that to Spanish and realize how fortunate you are to study Japanese verbs.

Spanish is not that bad: the conjugations are not gendered, while there are fewer than 20 major irregular patterns and about a dozen especially quirky verbs that you have to memorize in a few tenses (there are no 100% irregular verbs, most have at least some regular forms).

Source: I develop a conjugation app for a living

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#199

Post by danabramov » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

purpleflashing wrote: post #194

danabramov wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind some bashing but your comments actually read relatively warm to me — no worries about the tone. Re: expectations, it's a tricky thing. I think it's a bit unfair to say that this particular serialization of concepts can only serve as "me documenting my journey" and not "me teaching someone". Like, it's a bit presumptious to say that no one will actually learn from it. Maybe 45% find it incomprehensible, 4…

Someone learning from your journey is not you teaching them. Teaching is a very particular skillset and craft, especially teaching languages. It should be grounded in a teacher’s own experience learning something as it helps them to empathize with the learner but simply talking about how you learned something is not teaching.

I'm familiar with teaching. It's in a different space (programming) but I've done plenty of highly successful educational writing before. I understand what you're saying and again — I'm claiming that I've rigorously arranged the layering of intuition in this article. This is teaching. You may disagree with the approach but it's not a random braindump of "what I learned".

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#200

Post by purpleflashing » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #199

purpleflashing wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone learning from your journey is not you teaching them. Teaching is a very particular skillset and craft, especially teaching languages. It should be grounded in a teacher’s own experience learning something as it helps them to empathize with the learner but simply talking about how you learned something is not teaching.

I'm familiar with teaching. It's in a different space (programming) but I've done plenty of highly successful educational writing before. I understand what you're saying and again — I'm claiming that I've rigorously arranged the layering of intuition in this article. This is teaching. You may disagree with the approach but it's not a random braindump of "what I learned".

Well, if it’s teaching, it’s not very good then as you don’t seem to know much about your supposed students struggles with learning this concept. You only know your own.

E.g. the visualization you’re proud of — what problem does it solve for your potential learners? Do they actually have this problem? Not your assumption of the problem but you actually seeing them experiencing this problem and offering them visualization and seeing how it helps them to close the gap? If yes, why do you think your approach failed for HN audience?