As someone who is fluent in Japanese, the thing is that this is not an example of a method that works well, it’s an example of a beginner coming up with an overwrought headcanon (while calling it “simple”, nonetheless!) that ultimately will hinder their understanding, as I will detail elsewhere.

If this was a similar post about programming, it would not get upvoted here because more people would recognise it for what it is: a “Monads are Like Burritos” post from a well-meaning but misguided beginner.

> 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.

Thanks! I’d say that a big part of the motivation for me was to show that this piece is orthogonal to the rest of the language. You can sit down and understand how to conjugate almost any word to almost every suffix in the time it takes to read this. Yes — not fluently — and not “understanding” the language — but it’s wild to me that you can do that at all! It wasn’t obvious to me that this knowledge is orthogonal to everything else.

That’s what motivated me to write about it, really. In language courses all of this is often spread out over weeks or months. I thought it would be fun to write something that you can read in one evening and map out almost the entire system. With no prerequisites.

I’ve explicitly addressed this in the article. Cmd+F for a section called “why romaji is actually good” and then “why romaji is actually bad”. You may disagree with the approach, but I outlined my reasons for choosing it (as well as its downsides).

Agree. Especially how easy it is honestly to learn hiragana. You can practically learn it in a day and keep a table next to you to look up every time you forget one.

If you're at the point you're learning verbs you'd be mad not to know how to read some kana.

Kunrei shiki was abandoned a few months ago.

Um... 話します is the correct conjugation for 話す, what am I missing here?

The Japanese phonological system doesn't allow a /s/ sound to occur before the vowel /i/, the consonant must undergo palatalization and become /ɕ/ (the IPA symbol for the Japanese sh-like sound). Because this is a regular sound rule, the native writing system doesn't have a way to distinguish the nonexistent */si/ sequence from the /ɕi/ sequence that actually occurs, and this is the syllable that hiragana し or katakana シ indicate.

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.

Theorycrafting efficient ways of learning Japanese while being barely conversational yourself is a completely different hobby from actually learning Japanese (or actually studying the teaching of Japanese), and sadly in online spaces the former often swamps out discussion of the latter.

The online spaces can be really discouraging, true—but it can also be really discouraging to be in a classroom or in a foreign country, struggling to use a language you barely know. Meanwhile, there are also a lot of ways to spend effort trying to learn a language without gaining mastery. Truly frustrating.

If you want some decent level of fluency then there is something you have to do, which is to communicate with other people in context and with specific goals in mind (get information, give information, make a request, etc). Whatever you can do to arrange for that to happen is probably more valuable than anything you can do online or with books. I personally like to recommend finding classes at a local college.

If you can’t get that, then I think the next best thing is reading and listening.

Drills are also necessary but you can easily fill your time with drills without advancing your ability to communicate or understand people.

There is plenty of research about what is / is not effective when it comes to learning languages so I encourage people to at least take a look at the results of that research rather than just go with whatever people recommend online (I’m just some random person online, I may be no better than the next). AI tools reportedly have a positive effect but they are not nearly as good as human interaction.

Author here — it’s a really fun, elegant, and beautiful language. I highly recommend it if you’re interested. Maybe controversial but I think you can largely ignore the Japanese-learning community if/when the vibe isn’t right.

Mostly it helps to find learning resources that gel with your style of learning, and if possible, a tutor so you have a roadmap and more motivation. I found mine on italki. I also find Claude very helpful for sentence drills based on words and grammar I know.

If you’re taught to shift rows, and you already comfortably think in kana — yes, I think that’s equally good. Some of the materials I’ve tried learning from when I got started with the language didn’t do that, and instead described each case as special. That’s what I didn’t like.

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.

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.

"Official" in only the strictest sense. Everyone has used Hepburn since forever, the government just got around to acknowledging that.

And thank the lord that the romanization of Japanese (with its few little quirks) is one of the simplest transliterations there is.

> It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu".

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 latter. 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. The fluency always layers on separately anyway, understanding doesn’t “help” there. It’s just that personally I find understanding a great motivator (and fallback) for developing fluency.

-u godan verbs historically ended in ふ /fu/ (and earlier /pu/), and were written that way until the 20th century kana reform. So the historical conjugation pattern of a verb like tamau was tamafa-/tamafi-/tamafu-/tamafe- + additional inflectional endings. The /f/ became a /w/ before /a/ but weakened and was lost entirely in other positions, leading to the modern pattern of tamau, tamaimasu, etc. but tamawanai.

Similarly, when complaining about how you have to memorize a big table of verb conjugations in the intro, the author links to a table of... -ta forms, a verb form for which the author later concludes you just have to memorize a big table.

Why would you expect the article where I’m describing what worked for me to “discover something new”? I’m literally sharing the mental model that I personally found helpful. There’s nothing “new” in learning or teaching a language. But this is the most minimal model I’ve found useful, compared to others, and I wanted to share it with other people.

I think you’re taking a lot of stuff for granted. “Just” do cards etc. You’re using the word “stem” but what’s a stem? Why do we sometimes inject -i or -a (or -wa) there and sometimes we don’t? You still have to learn that and understand that. That’s what I’m describing in the article. If you already know stems and how they compose with suffixes, congratulations, you won’t find my article useful.

Fun, and a programmatic perspective. However, it can be too easy and fun to get super caught up in these details, if your goals are some level of fluency and ability to communicate/read. The majority of people that I know who have gained any level of fluency in Japanese as an adult mostly avoided stuff like this because (for many people; of course everybody is different) doing all of this mental math to dive down to the last detail was nowhere near as effective as some speaking and reading drills.

It is definitely well written and presented.

It’s concatenation with the asterisk, and the asterisk is what we build throughout the article.

Both of these things are described in the article. The first one is in “why romaji is actually bad” section, the second one is in “one more thing” part at the very end.

Author here. Strong disagree.

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.

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.

there are more irregular verbs than just kuru and suru. iku and aru are also irregular, for example.

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?"

I mean I think it’s both! As an author, I wrote this to settle my mental model. This doesn’t mean I could use it during fast speech, but I find it calming to understand the actual linguistic system behind the tables. Especially when it’s so elegant.

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 learned this 35 years ago to the tune of Clementine, youre using black sheep, my spouse uses another tune, but what funny is I learned it not with the 'i' endings, but with the dictionary form (sometimes called base-3) 'u' forms.

u tsu ru tte bu mu nu nde ku ite, gu ite

without the shi shite as that had been learned well ahead of the lesson adding ta/te forms.

I just think it's interesting how readily a little ditty tune helps people with recall, regardless of the actual tune.