There's different romanization systems and English learners usually use Hepburn

I think it’s probably a mistake to use Hepburn if you’re learning Japanese, it kinda gets in the way. Either learn kana (which takes what, a week?) or use one of the other romanization systems which maps more cleanly to Japanese orthography

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danabramov 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s a deliberate choice in the article. I cover every single caveat with it explicitly. I also mention this:

> (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.)

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klodolph 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That note isn’t much to go on.

I think the choice is not a good one, whether it is deliberate or by accident, it is not a good choice either way. The main caveat to Hepburn is that it’s unsuitable for explaining how Japanese works and it’s unsuitable for learning Japanese—so before you start working on verb conjugations, you pick up kana or one of the romanizations which is more aligned with Japanese.

The idea that you “shouldn’t think in romaji” is really “you shouldn’t think in Hepburn”. This is an important distinction! Japanese has a relatively small inventory of phonemes, somewhere around 20 or 22 of them, and they map very neatly to the latin alphabet.

But the article doesn’t make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.

IMO, this is kind of like seeing an article about how monads are burritos. Thinking that a monad is a burrito does not help me understand monads.

Nomu -> noma-nai / nomi-masu / nome-ru / nomo-u

Miru -> mi-nai / mi-masu / mire-ru / miyo-u

The ichidan and godan verbs are not assigned different categories because existing scholars of Japanese are just bad at explaining how they work, and you can still understand them just fine in romaji. I put the hyphens above to mark a place where you could think that the verb ends and the common conjugation forms end, and you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the “tricks”—but some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out (are you familiar with miru -> miyou conjugation, or miru -> mirareru?)

	▲	danabramov 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I concede that using Nihon-shiki maybe would’ve been more elegant for what I tried to do in the article. > But the article doesn’t make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points. Not at all. I give it two sections and then we move on. It doesn’t affect literally anything else on the page. You just learn to shift rows and move on. To make what points? > you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the “tricks”—but some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out I’m not quite sure what you mean to say in this part. I do cover -[r]eba and -[y]ou in the final section (“one more thing”) which extends the model to clearly handle that disappearing consonant. I think -[r]eru fits in there the same way, just as -[r]u itself. I think explaining it as mi + [y]ou = miyou, but nom_ + [y]ou = nomou is a clearer way to think about this. The rule is that the hole burns down the leading consonant (but takes the vowel).