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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

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Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#211

Post by iceflinger »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #157
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 tra…

For anyone interested in this kind of concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#212

Post by casey2 »

vessenes wrote: post #155

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…

Look at all the text that has been spilled for just a simple thing that could be explained adequately by "col(す)+row(い)=し". There is really not much point studying grammar if you don't know grammar first, much like studying bigfoot. People have strange hobbies, but we also have a ethical obligation to prevent young people from deluding themselves (and not sell them bigfoot nets) when it comes to topics that require a lot of time and energy.

In language learning you can run into a whole host of category errors and waste your time, learning words, grammar, culture, JLPT, hepburn, lingusistics, prosodic theory, an app, kanji instead of the language. It's a trap that obsessive people often fall into when they should have been listening to tapes until they can differentiate the sounds, match them to words and chatting with locals. Which is unfortunate since after learning the language these obsessive types could ace the JLPT no problem.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#213

Post by ragazzina »

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…

>in my experience the people who try to be smart and build systems almost never get decent

Do they have more fun than the other learners though?

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#214

Post by casey2 »

timr wrote: post #204
vessenes wrote: post #155

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…

> Wow, there is a lot of negative gatekeeping on learning Japanese in this thread. I recommend people chill out. Any discussion of Japanese here brings out a lot of extremely defensive nerds. I don't know why this happens more with Japanese, but it sure seems to. I don't have a strong opinion on the post, and I tend to think that if you find something that works for you, when it comes to languages, you should go with…

>I don't know why this happens more with Japanese

Because Japanese learners have been burned more often by snake oil, because it's both harder for most people trying to learn it than other languages and there are more people.

Despite my previous comment I don't recommend learning the written language first at all. The script is entirely too simple a model of language to even be useful. The first thing you are taught is that each character has one sounds, but that physically can't be true, there are millions of sounds and none of them sounds like an English speaking beginners' first guess. If Japanese was a formal system this might be desirable, but it's not. It's a physical means of communication and this "noise" is the error gradient that rewires your auditory cortex.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#215

Post by emodendroket »

timr wrote: post #204
vessenes wrote: post #155

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…

> Wow, there is a lot of negative gatekeeping on learning Japanese in this thread. I recommend people chill out. Any discussion of Japanese here brings out a lot of extremely defensive nerds. I don't know why this happens more with Japanese, but it sure seems to. I don't have a strong opinion on the post, and I tend to think that if you find something that works for you, when it comes to languages, you should go with…

> But that said -- and as others have noted -- the explanation here is misleading, and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration. Japanese conjugation is extremely simple, and the author is missing some essential context that would make it all much clearer. For example:

Doesn't going straight to kana actually kind of obscure the relationship between nomu and nomi that they both begin nom-?

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#216

Post by lmm »

danabramov wrote: post #175
lmm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main mistake seems to be meaning “[Hepburn] romaji” by writing “romaji”. I was obviously aware of other systems because that is what the sentence says but I thought it’s acceptable to refer to Hepburn as just “romaji” as a sort of the default one. "Romaji" does not (in English) mean "romanisation", as most people who've studied Japanese to at least beginner level know.

“Romaji” in Wikipedia literally redirects to “Romanization of Japanese” which says “This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji”. It sounds like your effort might be better spent fixing those problems in Wikipedia before continuing with the rest of the discussion here.

> "Romaji" does not (in English) mean "romanisation"

> This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji

See how there's not actually a contradiction there?

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#217

Post by [deleted] »

danabramov wrote: post #197
lmm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gon…

[deleted]

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#218

Post by danabramov »

purpleflashing wrote: post #205
danabramov wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that there's a subset of people (people like me) who find this approach enjoyable. Maybe you find it difficult to believe; that's cool. I'm not here to litigate whether these people exist. I didn't write this article for the HN audience, and I think some of the lurkers have likely found it helpful. I am offering what would have closed the gap for me. I trust my intuition on this.

As I said in the comment above, I do enjoy it as well, what I am pushing back is calling it pedagogical approach or teaching. If you taught, you know that you and your mind don’t matter much in the process of teaching, your student’s mind is in the center. Talking about something based on your own experience into an abstract void and hoping that some lurker’s mental model matches yours is not a rigorous pedagogical a…

Ordering topics by strict topological sorting with no cyclical dependencies, ensuring that there's a consistent picture built with each step, and that this picture monotonically converges towards the correct model as you move towards the end of the article is a rigorous pedagogical approach.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#219

Post by purpleflashing »

danabramov wrote: post #218
purpleflashing wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said in the comment above, I do enjoy it as well, what I am pushing back is calling it pedagogical approach or teaching. If you taught, you know that you and your mind don’t matter much in the process of teaching, your student’s mind is in the center. Talking about something based on your own experience into an abstract void and hoping that some lurker’s mental model matches yours is not a rigorous pedagogical a…

Ordering topics by strict topological sorting with no cyclical dependencies, ensuring that there's a consistent picture built with each step, and that this picture monotonically converges towards the correct model as you move towards the end of the article is a rigorous pedagogical approach.

No, that’s just rigorous writing. Rigorous pedagogical approach implies helping other minds to solve problems and obstacles with acquiring knowledge. Your approach results in coincidental learning because you don’t care about the mind of your learners and their problems, you care about your own.

I do suggest to experiment with your writing — try writing only about your own journey (and nothing else!), try sitting down with another person, multiple people, and teaching them the same thing. Try writing a post for them and them only after the session and see whether there are any differences.

A good teacher is not the one who proclaims themselves to be one.

Good luck!

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#220

Post by jaggederest »

lmm wrote: post #113
jaggederest wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

Ah, you mean those sounds don't exist in (standard) Japanese? I got confused by you talking about "the English equivalent".

Yes exactly so, sorry for the confusion.
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