Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

And wow.. you did seem to go out of your way to stay ahead of those comments. Respect for that.

And my respect for dissecting this aspect of Japanese grammar. You seemed to be dissatisfied spending time learning something that, in your eyes, wasn't yet condensed to its most basic rule. And I agree with that feeling. It leads to truely understanding how something became, eventually to discovery. Your article reads like you did that research mostly for yourself, but wanted to share what you found. That's a refreshing attitude, although the chances are high that field has been tilled thoroughly by Japanese linguists. I have to say I can't remember having seen any explanation about secret vowels/consonants in Japanese grammar books - I know some. But that may be because 1. I haven't read every there is, 2a. it's sort of doing archaeology on language and/or 2b. it doesn't add much to simplify learning the rules.

I confess my affair with grammar was always a cursory one and that may be because it proved to be so much more effective to go with examples, and pick that conjugation up as a side dish. But that's just me.

Compressing the rules does make sense, but at some point you just have to learn what's there. Language and grammar is always more or less arbitrary. Elegant yes, but arbitrary. It can't be derived from fundamentals. But the payoff makes it a worthwhile endeavor learning a language so strange from English as Japanese: you get a glimpse what the essence of language is. What a great motivation that was and is.

Some things that might spark your interest and keep exploring:

There are ごだん verbs that look like いちだん: 要る, 帰る, 限る, 切る, 知る, 入る, 走る, 滑る

Verbs with the same dictionary form but belonging to different conjugations: 切る/着る, 帰る/変える, 要る/居る, 減る/経る, 湿る/閉める, 練る/寝る

Keep up the good work. Doing research with the door open is a noble endeavor in its own right.

I skipped the handful of exceptions because they have no rules associated with them, you just have to memorize them. Yes, it would be 3 if I counted exceptions. I am aware that they exist; you can check their list at the end of my post.

>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.

I must have been unlucky. I don't remember what resource I was using but it was primarily teaching with a separate table per suffix. Maybe the pattern was called out but I missed it due to feeling overwhelmed with the tables.

>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.

That's fair — if most people don't stumble here because this is clearly explained, that's good, and it means I've overstated the "usually taught". I still find that I prefer the specific style of explanation where we consider the corresponding vowel a part of the suffix, like -(i)masu or -(a)nai, which is how some linguists view it. That is another part of the motivation for writing the article.