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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

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Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#231

Post by nine_k »

ivm wrote: post #198
nine_k wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I suppose that Arabic or Russian may have it much worse.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#232

Post by charcircuit »

danabramov wrote: post #153
charcircuit wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The straw man is how you claim it is usually taught. You claim that only 2 groups are taught when 3 get taught. You claim that you are given arbitrary tables to memorize, but it's usually explained to foreigners that you replace the last romaji to i when conjugating the verb into -masu form.

So in essence this article boils down to someone claiming that the usual explanation is confusing and then their own system turns out to be equivalent to the usual way it is explained.

And based off your comment here the reason behind doing this may be you extrapolating how you first learned it to how people usually learn it.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#233

Post by csande17 »

charcircuit wrote: post #232
danabramov wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The straw man is how you claim it is usually taught. You claim that only 2 groups are taught when 3 get taught. You claim that you are given arbitrary tables to memorize, but it's usually explained to foreigners that you replace the last romaji to i when conjugating the verb into -masu form. So in essence this article boils down to someone claiming that the usual explanation is confusing and then their own system tur…

I definitely remember only learning about two groups, personally. Is the third group, like, "irregular verbs", or do some books teach "the -suru verbs" as the third group (instead of "suru" being a single irregular verb that you can attach nouns to)?

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#234

Post by kazinator »

EdiX wrote: post #102
kazinator wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E.g: > not so lucky and got a "ru" ending? check what vowel before the "ru". it it's one of -aru, -oru, -uru, then it's also a godan verb. Wrong: 煽る (aoru) is ichidan: 煽った、煽りたい、煽らない、煽ろう、煽られる 。。。

煽る is a godan verb, consistent with your example conjugations (if it was ichidan it would be 煽た、煽たい, etc)

I can't remember which is which for more than five minutes!

I don't have a problem actually conjugating and don't have any tricks for it.

It comes with vocabulary. Once you have a vocabulary that contains enough verbs to hit all the cases, the rest just land in one of the cases by example.

If you know 泳ぐ (oyogu) very well, then even though you don't use 仰ぐ (aogu) very much, you just conjugate it intuitively like oyogu.

When you're speaking, there isn't enough time to go through a roster of rules.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#235

Post by thaumasiotes »

kazinator wrote: post #226
thaumasiotes wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

On the matter of 'si' and 'ti', they are not appropriate in a model of modern Japanese, which recognizes e.g. the onset of ち as a phoneme distinct from the onset of と. The orthography uses a digraph / diacritic for this, writing "ちゅ" for the single syllable that belongs in the -u column of the row containing ち, but that's not a reflection of Japanese phonology; it's a historical artifact.

It's still the case that Japanese speakers have difficulty producing the hypothetical sound 'si', but that doesn't mean that the syllable which is notionally given that place in the kana table represents that hypothetical sound. In English we have the very similar rule that the cluster /sj/ may be reduced to /ʃ/, but this obviously doesn't prove that the word "sheep" begins with the phoneme /s/.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#236

Post by emodendroket »

wren6991 wrote: post #229
emodendroket wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Sure it is. It's just bound to a vowel.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#237

Post by danabramov »

purpleflashing wrote: post #230
danabramov wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

My interpretation is that there’s a lot of dogma around how Japanese “should” be learned, in particularly among the English-speaking community. This dogma includes things like “you must learn kana first”, so a romaji-centered article triggered the alarm bells. Then there’s the general distrust of crank-style “beginner discovers the universe and wants to teach everyone” which also has a flavor of “he doesn’t understand that the only true way to achieve fluency is talking to people” and so on. It hit all the common warning flags that set people off, and that emotional reaction is the backbone of the response. It’s not an unfamiliar dynamic, and it’s reminiscent of some programming subcommunities, although in programming this dogmatic “you must learn/teach things this way” norm was more common in 2000s, and has mostly subsided by the end of 2010s. Overall, I get the impression that for a lot of people the difficulty of learning the language, and in particularly the difficulty of teaching it to others, have led to this kind of conviction. Once you’re expressing this kind of righteous rejection, I think it can be tricky to see that it comes across as sneering and gatekeeping when seen from outside your community.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#238

Post by danabramov »

lmm wrote: post #216
danabramov wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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?

Can you just explain what you’re trying to say. I genuinely don’t understand your point. What is my mistake?

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#239

Post by kazinator »

danabramov wrote: post #183
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.

Because Japanese does not have both "shi" and "si", and does not have both "tchi" and "ti", the latter are available as a notation to represent the former, and have been so used.

There is no need to encode rules like s* + i -> shi, because that is taken care of by the existing understanding that si encodes shi.

The romaji notation is not phoentically accurate to begin with (and neither are the Japanese writing systems); like it doesn't capture nasalization of G followed by N and what not. The "n" in "na" and oni" is different, yet we don't write ñi or whatever to indicate the palatization. The Hepburn romanization is just based on what is or is not convenient relative to English.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#240

Post by kazinator »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #235
kazinator wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the matter of 'si' and 'ti', they are not appropriate in a model of modern Japanese, which recognizes e.g. the onset of ち as a phoneme distinct from the onset of と. The orthography uses a digraph / diacritic for this, writing "ちゅ" for the single syllable that belongs in the -u column of the row containing ち, but that's not a reflection of Japanese phonology; it's a historical artifact. It's still the case that Jap…

> On the matter of 'si' and 'ti', they are not appropriate in a model of modern Japanese

No romanization scheme captures all the phonetic nuances of Japanese.

And neither does the Japanese writing system.

They are not intended to be detailed models of the spoken language.

> that doesn't mean that the syllable which is notionally given that place in the kana table represents that hypothetical sound

It's all convention. The umbrella handle し is also "notionally present" in the table, and represents the sound only by convention.

I have a native language in which the written combination "ni" often, but not always corresponds to a palatized n, very similar to the Japanese one. In other situations, the palatized n has to be explicitly annotated as ň. There are also exceptional siguations, like the names Niagara or Nikaragua, or the word nikotín.

If we were not to have any conventions like this, we would have to write using IPA symbols! That has downsides. One is the proliferation of symbols. The other is the need to adjust the phonetic spellings for regional dialects, and over time as phonetics changes. In other words, the writing system being a detailed model of phonetics is not necessarily a good thing.

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