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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

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Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#251

Post by kazinator »

csande17 wrote: post #108
EdiX wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 used to get these terms mixed up all the time because some textbooks use "Group 1" and "Group 2" to refer to these verbs, but Group 1 doesn't mean ichidan. For all that I'm not totally sold on this article's idea of "stems" and "suffixes", I think it does a good job of avoiding this pitfall and correctly explaining the groups.

Ichidan verbs end in "ru", but many verbs that end in "ru" are godan. Once and for all, I just have to remember that ichidan end in "ru" and drop the entire "ru" and replace it with the conjugative suffix; and so the previous kana stays the same (one column). The godan ones fracture the last kana, changing it into the four siblings in the same row (or else replace it with って or った). If we have a -ru verb and the -ru goes to -ri to make the stem, that indicates godan (帰る→帰り→帰ります); if it just drops to make the stem, godan (見る→見→見ます）. I have no need to tell which is which, other than discussing grammar with other gaijin. I would never remember that a verb is supposed to be godan, in order to then know how conjugate it; I already know how to conjugate it and so just for academics, I have to remember which pattern is classified as which conjugation.

An important aspect of vocabulary that informs you about verbs is knowing the nominal: the noun-like stem. Like when you consider 帰る, you know from your vocabulary that there is no noun-like word "kae" that is just written 帰. You know that "homecoming" is not "kae" but "kaeri", 帰り.

So from that alone you know instinctively which way it conjugates: らない、れない、りたい、った、って、ろう、。。。

And a big source of learning the stem is ... japanese polite speech with -masu.

This is how children absorb what the stems are: hearing all the verbs in -masu form.

For instance, I think that every single verb that ends in "-rimasu" in the polite form (other than just arimasu?) is a godan -ru word. Drop the masu and you have a -ri stem, which implies the word is -ru, and conjugates godan: -ranai, -renai, -ritai, -rō, -tta, -tte, ...

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#252

Post by runarberg »

danabramov wrote: post #245
runarberg wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a native english speaker so perhaps I misunderstood what headcanon meant. But I took it to mean as expanded upon by GP, that you were a well meaning but misguided beginner and have some ideas about what works for language learners that is not expressed by language learners experts. My personal headcanon to verb conjugation is that you know them when you know them, the shorter the explanation the better, spen…

> have some ideas about what works for language learners that is not expressed by language learners experts. This seems like a culture clash. In programming blogging, it is completely fine to write blog posts about the mental model that works for you (as long as it doesn't contradict evidence) and then maybe it works for somebody else. The idea that I need to first get an approval from a commission of Serious Teacher…

I think you may be spot on about the culture clash. Language learning takes a long time, and there are really no short-cuts nor magic solutions that will get you from zero to competent within any reasonable amount of time. This is in stark contrast with programming. If you already know a programming language, you can get reasonably acquainted with your second one by following a really good tutorial in a single afternoon (depending on the languages though).

This make a lot of language learners (including my self) extremely vary and reactive of tutorials and explainers such as these. In the language learning space, tutorials belong as chapters in a good textbook, and explainers belong in dedicated sites written by teachers who have proven their worth with dozens of other explainers (e.g. https://www.tofugu.com/). The difference is that these are meant as part of a much much much longer journey.

[Aside]: Japanese is actually my 5th language and the first that is self taught and outside the language environment. I am also a self taught programmer. I have observed that learning Japanese is in a totally different league then any programming language. I am now two years into learning Japanese, and I can barely read a kids book, and no way can I hold a conversation. At this point in my programming journey I was already writing three programming languages fluently (JavaScript, Python, and R) and was learning the 4th and 5th at the same time (Rust and Julia).

[Re: “this is what got me unstuck”]: It is quite common in the language learning space to learn things intuitively by mere exposure. And sometimes a language learner will falsely attribute some (what appears to them as a) novel approach to what got them unstuck, but what really happened is that just engaging with the language reinforced old neural pathways and they just suddenly “got it”, the novel approach could have been anything, what mattered was the engagement, not the technique. This is also true in programming, but in language learning it is extremely common. Our brains are wired to learn natural languages, and given enough exposure to the language we will learn it.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#253

Post by lmm »

danabramov wrote: post #238
lmm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?

You're saying "romaji" when you mean "romanisation". Yes in Japanese it's called ヘボン式ローマ字, but when people use "romaji" as a loanword in English it's generally understood to mean the written characters, the result of romanisation, not the process of romanisation (and certainly not "Hepburn romanisation specifically as distinct from other romanisation systems", but you've already non-apologised for that).

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#254

Post by lmm »

danabramov wrote: post #151
lmm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are lots of people in the comments somehow offended by the author's genuine excitement over the method that worked well enough for them that they wanted to share it. Did it work for them though? They apparently never got past the basics. So IMO it's more likely the opposite; they've distracted themselves from getting on with learning.

I started learning a couple of months ago (with a couple of false starts before). What level am I supposed to be at by this point? This is so incredibly condescending I don’t even know what to say.

Generally before you presume to teach (a term you've used repeatedly about this post) beginners you should be at least B2 level in the target language.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#255

Post by lmm »

danabramov wrote: post #165
lmm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article. Nope. You correct yourself after, sure, but what I wrote is how it came across at the time when reading. > Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji No, that's not what "romaji" means. If you mean Hepburn, say Hepburn. And if you don't know the difference, that's a sign to learn more before presuming to tea…

I’ve already conceded in sibling comments that saying “romaji” to mean “Hepburn romaji” specifically is technically imprecise. Note I still do explicitly mention other romanization systems, want to stay consistent within the article, and don’t want to overload the reader with terminology. My motivation here is that realistically that’s the romaji you’re going to be exposed to the most as a learner. At least that’s be…

> I’ve already conceded in sibling comments that saying “romaji” to mean “Hepburn romaji” specifically is technically imprecise. Note I still do explicitly mention other romanization systems, want to stay consistent within the article, and don’t want to overload the reader with terminology. My motivation here is that realistically that’s the romaji you’re going to be exposed to the most as a learner.

It's not just a technicality. "i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji" is not just sloppy but outright misleading, as though "si" and "tu" were somehow not romaji.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#256

Post by musicale »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #104
musicale wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The explanation made sense to me: romaji works well for vowel shifts (as the vowels aren't glued to consonants) while kana works well for consonant shifts (because the vowels are glued to consonants). Latin text's smaller tokens/phonemes have advantages and disadvantages, but they are a convenient notation for getting the author's point across. The difference in phonemes reminds me of how game designer Naramura came…

> while in kanji it would have been "Muranara" Not quite. If you change the order of some kanji, the general case is that the resulting text has no definite pronunciation. You definitely would not expect that the sounds assigned to the kanji in one ordering would be the same ones assigned in a new ordering. This is a phenomenon the Japanese sometimes play with. In the novel Musashi , Musashi comes up with that name b…

Interesting - are you saying that is the case for Nara + Mura? (I imagine it may depend on the specific characters used for the name, which I do not actually know, but I was guessing that something like 楢 (nara/oak) + 村 (mura/village) would be readable/pronounceable forward or backward.)

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#257

Post by timr »

danabramov wrote: post #247
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…

>the explanation here is misleading Misleading means it leads to a wrong conclusion somewhere. Please demonstrate which wrong conclusion my article is leading to. >and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration There is no "dependence" on transliteration per se. I use it as a visual shortcut for moving along the kana row, as I show in the middle of the post using the table. For all the examples we'r…

Speaking of defensive…you’re on every comment thread here, arguing with anyone who disagrees with you, even a little. I didn’t say you were “wrong” — I said that your approach isn’t going to work well for most people as they learn, because it’s missing context. I gave you an example in my comment. Take my advice or not, but it’s true.

> What could kanji possibly have to do with this? We're discussing a thing rooted in phonetics.

Your system is using a limited model that explains some things, but doesn’t explain many others. You need the kanji to see the entire elephant.

Obviously linguistics are post hoc explanations of evolved phenomena and never precisely categorize everything, but there’s a more complete system here. It’s best to start learning it early, instead of relying on the crutch of romaji.

> The verb stem often includes kana in addition to kanji (e.g. 食べ). There's nothing special here about kanji at all.

The point was that there’s a clear stem. For godan verbs, the stem is nearly always the kanji. Sometimes, there are only kana (びびる), typically because the kanji is complex. A few times, there are auxiliary kana (e.g. 変わる). For a beginner, this is not important. You’re also mixing ichidan verbs (食べる) where this is the common case (kana from the i or e sounds), with godan verbs, where it is not. Understanding this fact, alone, almost eliminates the need to memorize which verbs are ichidan.

With relatively rare exceptions, the ichidan verb stem contains kana, and the godan verb does not. The major exception class to this for godan verbs is the ~まる intransitive verbs, where the ま/わ remains part of the stem (変わる、閉まる、泊まる、etc). Otherwise, it’s weird stuff like adjectives turned verbs or slang.

Just knowing this gives you a linguistic intuition for identifying and choosing intransitive verbs!

> However, since I assume the reader might not want to constantly look at the kana table,

They don’t need to. They just need to memorize the kana. People keep telling you this across this thread.

Learn the kana, and these conjugation rules become so trivial that you barely even need to “memorize” anything.

> I focus on the phonetic intuition. And the phonetic intuition is trivially explained with romaji, which is why I use them.

Phonetic intuition is good. Doing it via romaji is fine for absolute beginners, but rapidly becomes a hindrance.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#258

Post by runarberg »

nakedneuron wrote: post #138
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…

Agree. Experience shows that fluency arises when you don't have to think about rules anymore. My advice is to not spend too much time learning grammar rules (actually, no time, like native learners). Leave the rule discovery to your unconscious brain and get going with rote repetition. Your brains "language module" is not a slow computer, computing rules, it's a fast lookup-table.

A little explanation goes a long way though, Keyword here being little.

When starting out it is super nice to know stuff like: here is how you say if-then statements, here is how you recommend stuff, here is how make guesses, here is how you quote another person, etc. etc.

That said, I would argue most textbooks get the ratio of the length of the explanation vs. example sentences wrong. For every sentence in the explanation you should have at least three examples.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#259

Post by runarberg »

etrvic wrote: post #192

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?

Since this is HN I may as well pitch my kanji learning app: https://shodoku.app/ (Github repo: https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku )

If you want to procrastinate actually learning (the HN way): scraping and parsing a couple of dictionaries, stroke samples, and sentence translation repos, setting them up in a local sqlite db and have fun exploring connections in the language with SQL queries. Guaranteed to keep you away from actually learning the language for at least 2 months.

In seriousness, I do recommend textbooks above anything else. Structure is your no. 1 friend as you go through the language. Go to r/LearnJapanese to find the right textbook for you. Use apps only complement your learning, SRS is amazing for memorization and Anki is pretty good to optimize your vocab. Same goes for my app Shodoku. Only use it to complement your learning, if you want to learn how to write, write primarily in your notebook and only go through the app to optimize your memory.

Re: Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

#260

Post by csande17 »

kazinator wrote: post #251
csande17 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to get these terms mixed up all the time because some textbooks use "Group 1" and "Group 2" to refer to these verbs, but Group 1 doesn't mean ichidan. For all that I'm not totally sold on this article's idea of "stems" and "suffixes", I think it does a good job of avoiding this pitfall and correctly explaining the groups.

Ichidan verbs end in "ru", but many verbs that end in "ru" are godan. Once and for all, I just have to remember that ichidan end in "ru" and drop the entire "ru" and replace it with the conjugative suffix; and so the previous kana stays the same (one column). The godan ones fracture the last kana, changing it into the four siblings in the same row (or else replace it with って or った). If we have a -ru verb and the -ru…

> For instance, I think that every single verb that ends in "-rimasu" in the polite form (other than just arimasu?) is a godan -ru word.

Not quite: https://jisho.org/search/%23words%20%23v1%20%3F*%E3%82%8A%E3...

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