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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

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Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#221

Post by jaggederest »

stasomatic wrote: post #209
jaggederest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english. Complaining that there's no english equivalent of the russian (взгляд / vzglyad)'s initial cluster would be similar in feel - no english words use it, so the romanization can be whatever you like, really.

Sorry, not a linguist by any means, I initially thought you meant there is no 1:1 mapping to the meaning ("outlook", "glance", "sight"). Are you talking about the v-z-g-l sequence of harsh consonants? That looks uninviting in print, but in practice it's just a quick puff of air.

Yes, exactly, there's no equivalent cluster in english, so it's hard for english speakers to even hear it, let alone reproduce it correctly

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#222

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

#223

Post by danabramov »

purpleflashing wrote: post #219
danabramov wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dow…

Let’s just call it a blog post. I used the word “teaching” loosely and didn’t mean to hit a nerve. If somebody else called a carefully assembled sequence of learning units teaching, I wouldn’t blink an eye at that, so I applied this to the post. “Rigorously writing about sharing what I’ve learned in a way that I would’ve found useful” sounds good to me.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#224

Post by purpleflashing »

danabramov wrote: post #223
purpleflashing wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dow…

Let’s just call it a blog post. I used the word “teaching” loosely and didn’t mean to hit a nerve. If somebody else called a carefully assembled sequence of learning units teaching, I wouldn’t blink an eye at that, so I applied this to the post. “Rigorously writing about sharing what I’ve learned in a way that I would’ve found useful” sounds good to me.

>I wouldn’t blink an eye to that

And I said that, in my opinion, this is where your post failed to communicate what you intended to communicate and you have a crowd of “aktshually, this is wrong” in the comments.

Seriously, without any snark intended, if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”.

Bad teaching elicits negative response, so don’t mislead people into thinking you will teach them anything. If they learn because your heuristic works for them, they will.

I might be wrong, of course, but I believe (and hope) that you will have a lot more empathetic and friendly response.

You didn’t hit a nerve, I just like talking about communication and learning.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#225

Post by TonyStr »

danabramov wrote: post #180
TonyStr wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, you don't need to "learn" or "understand" much grammar explicitly. I think it definitely helps get you off your feet, as you can "decode" sentences if you remember grammar rules, but eventually the grammar has to be internalized anyway. This happens when you are repeatedly exposed to the same patterns in context. I don't know how English or Norwegian grammar works, and I'm fluent in those. I skipped grammar…

Clearly you and I learn differently. If I need to apply suffixes correctly, I want to understand how to do it predictably without learning every single form for every single word. Even if patterns coalesce in my mind into an intuition later, I appreciate seeing the shape of these patterns. Especially when they’re so elegant. Why is sharing that a problem?

I didn't criticize either your article or your comment :). I enjoyed reading the article and finally learning why it's called godan and ichidan, and it was fun to learn that kau was originally kawu.

Any mention of Japanese learning always brings out negativity and criticism (and the effect is probably doubled by being on HackerNews) so I understand that you're on defense.

My comment was really just an objection to "You still have to learn that and understand that", as I don't think studying grammar is a mandatory step in learning a language (I'm a subscriber to the Input Hypothesis by Stephen Krashen). Though it could very well be that grammar study is an effective shortcut to internalizing grammar. At the end of the day, the amount of hours spent learning from context matters way more than the specific steps taken along the way.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#226

Post by kazinator »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #106
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.

> 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 That's how all conjugation schemes work. There's nothing weird about this. Stems aren't supposed to exist in the spoken language. But they are observable in the spoken language. Compare how a modern dictionary will give you ποιέω,…

I should have said that they don't exist in the written language; but using an alternative one lets them be written. This is why romaji appears handy in this matter. It lets us have a stem ending in "r", which doesn't change when we have "a", "u", etc after it.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#227

Post by runarberg »

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…

I would not call this gatekeeping, I would call this a simple (albeit loud) critique, and maybe a reality check. Gatekeeping is when someone new is not allowed to enter a certain space, but people here are simply pointing out that this article is not the expert opinion of somebody that know how to teach Japanese verb conjugation, and that tutorials like these, while not harmful, are not super useful either.

Learning Japanese is fun, and I encourage the author, and the readers of this post to continue learning. But my advice to new learners is to just get a textbook (or some structured material; but please, just get a textbook unless you are one of the minority cases where you can’t for the life of you follow a textbook) and learn the conjugations little by little as they advance through their textbook (or their alternative structured material) one chapter at a time and consume more and more advanced Japanese language material over the course of dozens of months.

For the people who do that, I promise you, if you study for an hour or two a day, just following some structured material aimed towards beginners (preferably a textbook) and engage with the language as frequently, you will intuitively understand and be able to produce the mostly correct (i.e. with diminishing errors) by 3-6 months.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#228

Post by danabramov »

purpleflashing wrote: post #224
danabramov wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s just call it a blog post. I used the word “teaching” loosely and didn’t mean to hit a nerve. If somebody else called a carefully assembled sequence of learning units teaching, I wouldn’t blink an eye at that, so I applied this to the post. “Rigorously writing about sharing what I’ve learned in a way that I would’ve found useful” sounds good to me.

>I wouldn’t blink an eye to that And I said that, in my opinion, this is where your post failed to communicate what you intended to communicate and you have a crowd of “aktshually, this is wrong” in the comments. Seriously, without any snark intended, if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and thi…

> if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”.

This is literally what my post says!!! It’s the entire framing of the post. Please read it:

> i've tried to learn Japanese verb conjugation a few times before. at first, it looks simple (you just swap suffixes!), but there's a lot of nuance that can drag you down as a learner. i found a system i prefer but let me first explain why i struggled. […] i found this approach to teaching deeply frustrating and unsatisfying.

You’re projecting some kind of fantasy onto my post where it’s presumably claiming that it’s the best way to learn or that I’m a great teacher or whatever. Instead the post is literally sharing what worked for me, and what I wish was available.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#229

Post by wren6991 »

emodendroket wrote: post #215
timr wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-?

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

No, because nom- is not a sound that exists in Japanese phonetics.

nomu/nomi share the initial の, and む/み are in the same column of the kana table (五十音/gojuuon).

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#230

Post by purpleflashing »

danabramov wrote: post #228
purpleflashing wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wouldn’t blink an eye to that And I said that, in my opinion, this is where your post failed to communicate what you intended to communicate and you have a crowd of “aktshually, this is wrong” in the comments. Seriously, without any snark intended, if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and thi…

> if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”. This is literally what my post says!!! It’s the entire framing of the post. Please read it: > i've tried to learn Japanese verb conjugation a few times before. at first, it looks simple (you just swap suffixes!), but…

I did, I didn’t have a problem understanding your goals as I said in one of the comments in the beginning:

> 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)

(you focused on the fact that you also aimed to teach and we discussed that aspect a little bit), but a lot of people in the comments didn’t understand the goal of your post — why do you think it happened?

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