Fascinating to hear non-tech insight from Dan, especially as a fellow (rookie) student of 日本語.

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.

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danabramov 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe it’s not very clear but I don’t suggest studying from articles like this alone. Obviously you need to do sentence drills and talk to a tutor or native speakers to have any chance of success. I still find documenting my mental model helpful because most articles I’ve seen before were not teaching it clearly enough for my taste.

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holistio 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I like to do deep dives like this not to memorise but to understand deeper layers, the spirit of the language, the way it moves, the way it unfolds.

	▲	mc3301 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		By all means, it is fun to play with a language. And every person's brain works differently. I like to use this metaphor, though. You're hiking a mountain, this journey to the "peak" is reaching some goal of fluency. It's fun to stop and look at rocks, examining, comparing and whatnot. But it doesn't necessarily get you closer to the peak. I mean, it might, because you'll better understand your footing every-so-slightly. Not a perfect metaphor.
	▲	danabramov 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Thanks! Feels like the only person on this page who gets what I was going for.