I prefer having a system to simply memorizing. I don’t know what you mean by “so much effort”. I am literally just describing the system as it is brick by brick. If you see an opportunity to simplify, you’re welcome to provide a specific suggestion. I find this system rather elegant, and I tried to build it piece by piece because that’s my preferred way both to learn and to teach.
>the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down
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. So I didn’t spend much time on te/ta-form. (That said, even for -te/ta form, I find it calming to think of -nda as a contraction of -nita, and so on, which AFAIK is in the ballpark of what historically happened.)
> Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you
I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if there’s a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it. Even if there’s a layer of memorization and repetition to achieve actual fluency. Japanese conjugation is a rare case where the system actually is very clear and methodical. The article is written for people like me who also prefer to know it. There’s literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I don’t understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
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 are not (which was posed as a problem to solve in the intro).
Just make cards and mark the stem, learn it along with the verb. No need for heuristics. If you ever forget, you’re bound to remember the masu-form and can reverse engineer the stem from that 100%.
It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.
It is always a crutch for the first year student or the barely passed second year student that never helps with real Japanese.
Writing out romaji in Japan is likely to confuse more than help someone else understand.
I’ll be honest that I also wanted (as a challenge) to write this article so that a person with zero Japanese knowledge would be able to correctly conjugate almost every word to every ending. This is more of a teaching drill for myself though but it’s another reason for the romaji choice.
Latin text's smaller tokens/phonemes have both 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 up with the (Spanish-sounding) name "La Mulana" for his game by spelling his name backwards in kana. In romaji it would have been "Arumaran" which is completely different (while in kanji it would have been "Muranara".)
If you're at the point you're learning verbs you'd be mad not to know how to read some kana.
> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as し on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi".
I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.
> this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
Then the article includes an exercise that verifies the reader’s understanding.
I also included a note:
> (note 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, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji, therefore it’s invalid.
> there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. […] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. […] i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
If you fix all the errors that are in the article, at best there is an argument buried here that Hepburn romanization should not be used to teach Japanese to English speakers—but I think that point is really my own argument that I’m making with the fragments of the article that make sense.
Romanization can be more consistent with Japanese phonetics or it can be more consistent with English phonetics, and the Hepburn romanization is more consistent with English phonetics, which is why it’s a good choice for English speakers that don’t know Japanese, but a bad choice for English speakers who are trying to learn Japanese.
You may argue with my choice, or maybe you can argue that referring to cells in Hiragana table solely by my chosen romanization is somehow bad, and I should instead be inconsistent and give the same mora two different romanizations within a single article. Is that what you’re suggesting?
Second: am I arguing that the choice of using Hepburn here is somehow bad? Yes, that’s correct. I think Hepburn is a bad choice here. A good choice is Nihon-shiki. JSL romanization is also fine.
I think I agree that Nihon-shiki and explaining it upfront would’ve made the article more elegant. One constraint I wanted to hit is that a person should be able to read this article with zero knowledge of Japanese, and walk away with being able to conjugate almost every verb to every suffix correctly. This is more of a challenge to myself as a writer than any practical need but hope it shed some light on the choices and the framing. I liked Hepburn because it’s closer to how it sounds. You can imagine I’m using IPA instead if you want.
> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible. Like, if I don’t understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together don’t produce the right Hepburn in the end?
YMMV indeed, but I think the lesson here is “this is why you don’t use Hepburn when you’re writing an article about Japanese verb conjugations”.
Hepburn does make sense for somebody with zero knowledge of Japanese but it just gets in the way when you are trying to explain how Japanese works. So lesson zero is “don’t rely on Hepburn” and IMO if you are interested in pronunciation and listening you should be using audio as your primary source.
> (note 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, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
In the Hepburn romanization system, which generally tries to be transparent to speakers of English or other European languages, し is romanized as _shi_, because this indicates to English speakers that the /s/ -> /ɕ/ sound change happens. In the Kunrei-siki romanization system, which tries to be more faithful to the distinctions made in the Japanese phonological system, し is romanized as _si_ to be consistent with the other possible syllables _sa_ _su_ _se_ _so_ that begin with the consonant /s/.
And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet is a sign that their command of Japanese isn't all that good yet.
I don’t understand where this misunderstanding about my article comes from. I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”. My article uses romaji so this is self-consistent. I am also mentioning that there is an alternative system that would romanize it as “si” but that’s not the one I’m using in my article.
It seems like the article is trying to make the case that in romaji, you can split the letters and isolate the vowel (e.g. the asterix in the article's conjugation).
But we were simply taught to change from the う- row to the い- row (u- row to i- row). I switched to Japanese to illustrate that you can make that statement even without romaji. In that case, it seems like basically the same thing?
As an anecdotal point, my class was mostly non-english speakers and I didn't find the above to be a sticking point for my classmates. The real sticking points were messing up the ichidan verb exceptions (ichidan verbs that look like godan) and conjugating the correct form for the different grammar points. Te and ta form were also a bit tricky. But the article doesn't seem to offer anything new to help there.
That said, part of the challenge to myself with this article was to allow someone to learn Japanese conjugation even if they have zero knowledge of the language (even no kana). So that’s another constraint influencing my choice. I also wanted to have the visual “gluing” throughout the article as an aid for intuition, so that’s another reason I used romaji.
It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
Mu, bu and nu also all obey the -nda transformation due to phonetics, and not due to how "if we just shuffle the letters around and presto! Nomu becomes nonda".
Japanese already has plenty of its own reading inconsistencies, so adding another layer on top isn't going to help you.
Finally, there's going to be so much kana in your every day life that learning conjugation in romaji is guaranteed to cripple your reading, because instead of recognizing kana (e.g. you see a billboard that says お茶を飲んだ方がいい！ as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go) you've spent the first n hours on trying to "hack" the language instead of just learning it.
All of this is described just below, in the section called “why romaji is actually bad”, with these specific examples being tested.
> It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
This is also described further below in the post.
> as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go
I see “understanding the system” and “applying it fluently” as two separate activities. I find romaji more illustrative for the former because the system is phonetical on a sub-mora level. Whereas kana is more helpful for the former. I don’t assume my reader is an idiot, and so I assume that they would be able to pick the right tool for the job on their learning journey.
Japanese is known as an agglutinative language [0], and how verbs are conjugated also has a lot to do with politeness, as well as local dialects. That's why you can turn on an anime and hardly understand it, even after a couple years of study.
I got to the third year college level in my own Japanese studies, and at that point, memorizing kanji was starting to compete with my computer science studies, so I had to drop it. I got to travel to Japan and live with host families (we kind of settled on a Japanese/English pidgin), so I don't regret the experience.
First, we learnt verbs in the -masu form. Nomimasu, tabemasu and so on.
Then we learnt this song (to the tune of Clementine)
chi ri i tte mi ni bi nde kiite giite
It's a quick mneumonic to help you go from the polite verb to the "te-form" ending. I hummed it in my head while working out the conjugation before it became natural and "obvious".
It is definitely well written and presented.
Romaji are great, and in some ways more instructive because they reveal patterns which are otherwise a little hidden. You just have to realize that S+I is shi, T+U is tsu, etc. I don’t want to get too deep into it but there is a regularity to the language, and rules, and different choices of writing system reveals different pieces of the puzzle.
Next, the conjugation itself. There are massive categories of conjugations missing! Like, how do you get from taberu / nomu in this system to tabereru / nomereru? It turns out that these ichidan and godan verbs actually do have some differences in conjugation. Who’d have thought? (There is the -i stem, but there are other forms.)
I prefer the term "group 2 verbs" to "-ru verbs." Group 2 verbs are verbs that end in -eru or -iru, not just -ru. Of course there are some exceptions, like kaeru, which ends in -eru but is actually a -u verb. Conjugation is easy: remove the final -ru and append -masu, -mashita, etc.
"Group 1 verbs" (again, -u verbs) are verbs that are not group 2 verbs. Conjugation is a bit more difficult because the -nu, -bu, -mu, and -u verbs have many suffixes. However, after memorizing these two (-nbmu and -u, because -nu, -bu, and -mu are almost the same), the rest are easy.
There are only two irregular verbs: kuru and suru. Just memorize them.
I learned Japanese by just memorizing. Once you have memorized enough verbs and their conjugations, you can figure out the conjugation of a new verb even if you don't understand how it works.
Irregulars notwithstanding, the conjugation pattern is actually completely lossless if you just remember the imperative form (e.g. 着ろ kiro, 切れ kire) instead of the infinitive, which is lossy (e.g. 着る kiru, 切る kiru). Then there's no need to have to remember, "oh... is this -iru verb group 1 or group 2?"
There’s no clever engineer hack that replaces time spent with the language. and with regard to japanese, please stay away from romaji, unless you're still in beginner stage and typing things out to communicate words you already know the phonetics to.
The choice of romaji is deliberate for multiple reasons and is defended in the article (with counter-arguments for why it’s bad too).
i chi ri tte
bi mi ni nde
ki ite
gi ite
shi shite