I started to learn Japanese 30 years ago, and in my experience the people who try to be smart and build systems almost never get decent. It’s procrastination while thinking they’re actually productive.

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%.

▲

dayjaby 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The article could just be two words: ichidan, godan. Done.

▲

csande17 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲

danabramov 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system that doesn’t reduce further. I think there’s still value in having a solid model for everything else. At least I personally found it valuable, which is why I thought to share it with people.

▲

csande17 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not totally sure this "stems and suffixes" mental model really works well for everything else. Forms like the imperative (食べろ), volitional (食べよう), provisional (食べれば), potential (食べられる), and causative (食べさせる) aren't cleanly handled either -- they work similarly for godan verbs, but you have to add a different suffix for ichidan verbs.

It's definitely useful to understand how "chi" and "tsu" fit into the hiragana chart, and if your asterisk notation helps you remember which verbs are ichidan vs godan then that's great, but I'm not sure it's worth trying to unify -masu and -nai into one model.

▲

danabramov 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Forms like the imperative (食べろ), volitional (食べよう), provisional (食べれば), potential (食べられる), and causative (食べさせる) aren't cleanly handled either -- they work similarly for godan verbs, but you have to add a different suffix for ichidan verbs.

They are cleanly handled in the final section (“one more thing”) that introduces a notion of disappearing consonant like -[r]u, -[r]eba and so on, and gives a rule for it. This is a perfect inversion of what happens with -(i)masu and friends. The hole in the stem accepts the leading vowel but burns down the leading consonant.

It’s quite elegant.

▲

csande17 4 hours ago | parent [-]

"Disappearing consonant" doesn't work for the potential form, unless you expand the representation to allow writing -[rar]eru. (Edit: And I think imperative would require like "-[ro](e)".)

Which, like, is clean in the sense that Redux is technically Turing-complete (you can encompass _any_ difference between two strings by saying that one string uses the stuff in brackets and the other string uses the stuff in parentheses), but that doesn't make it a good idea.

	▲	danabramov 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Okay, that one’s fair! I remember there was also some other one that had it split into two completely different suffixes. My answer to this is that by the time you’re learning those, you’re already so fluent in conjugation that a couple of special cases will layer on fine. It’s way better then you get in most languages. (And pedantically I’d still say [] works for the cases above, as you’ve shown.) I honestly don’t understand the cynicism here. If I could read this article when I started learning, it would’ve saved me a ton of time. That’s why I wrote it. I hope it’ll be useful to someone else but it’s fine if not. As an educator I’m proud of how much it crams in that’s usually spread over many weeks, and how the simple model almost perfectly generalizes. But yeah sure it’s making some unorthodox choices and leaves a couple of advanced cases within one indirection. I’m still very happy with it.

▲

danabramov 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	TonyStr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly, you don't need to "learn" or "understand" much grammar explicitly. I think it definitely helps get you off your feet, as you can "decode" sentences if you remember grammar rules, but eventually the grammar has to be internalized anyway. This happens when you are repeatedly exposed to the same patterns in context. I don't know how English or Norwegian grammar works, and I'm fluent in those. I skipped grammar in Japanese and focused on reading, yet I can understand most things and I can tell when something sounds wrong.