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.

As someone who's never tried learning Japanese, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the deep dive and am now less afraid to check out some more serious tutorials (though I wish everyone put as much effort into explaining the system behind something so often dismissed as "just memorise it").

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.

Because the whole article is built upon a straw man (it's not usually taught the way he claims) and the "method" is just a normal explanation (see this section on wikipedia).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_conjugation#Verb_grou...