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Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way

160 points by valzevul 4mo ago

holistio 4mo ago
Fascinating to hear non-tech insight from Dan, especially as a fellow (rookie) student of 日本語.
- mc3301 4mo ago
  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.
  - holistio 4mo ago
    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.
    - danabramov 4mo ago
      Thanks! Feels like the only person on this page who gets what I was going for.
      - iainmerrick 4mo ago
        I'm a bit dismayed by all the negativity you're getting. Thanks for all your level-headed and detailed responses here. I have a hard time understanding why people object to this kind of attempt to systematize something that conventionally relies on rote learning. I've always found that figuring out the underlying rules helps with the rote learning. When you see some new word or conjugation, it's super helpful to have a method for explaining why it's that way; it helps fix it in your mind. I wonder if native speakers object to this approach because it isn't really how you learn as a kid. You don't learn any abstract rules, you just absorb a huge amount of training material and construct your own model. But that doesn't mean adults need to learn in the same way; we can and should leverage our painfully-acquired knowledge and skills from other domains.
        danabramov 4mo ago
        FWIW I actually haven’t seen negative feedback from the native speakers I’ve shared it with. (Maybe they didn’t want to upset me! I don’t know :)
        iainmerrick 4mo ago
        Well, the native speakers or otherwise self-diagnosed experts who felt obliged to chip in here!
    - mc3301 4mo ago
      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 4mo ago
    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.
wren6991 4mo ago
> now let's try to apply the rules: > hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!) I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as し on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi". I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.
- donw 4mo ago
  Um... 話します is the correct conjugation for 話す, what am I missing here?
  - klodolph 4mo ago
    hanasimasu = 話します
    - donw 4mo ago
      I also still don't understand why the author thought this was wrong?
      - klodolph 4mo ago
        Because the author of the article hasn’t internalized that si is pronounced “shi”, is my guess.
        danabramov 4mo ago
        The article literally says: > there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. […] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. […] i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
        4mo ago
plastic041 4mo ago
Categorizing Japanese verbs as -ru or -u requires more context. I prefer the term "group 2 verbs" to "-ru verbs." Group 2 verbs are verbs that end in -eru or -iru, not just -ru. Of course there are some exceptions, like kaeru, which ends in -eru but is actually a -u verb. Conjugation is easy: remove the final -ru and append -masu, -mashita, etc. "Group 1 verbs" (again, -u verbs) are verbs that are not group 2 verbs. Conjugation is a bit more difficult because the -nu, -bu, -mu, and -u verbs have many suffixes. However, after memorizing these two (-nbmu and -u, because -nu, -bu, and -mu are almost the same), the rest are easy. There are only two irregular verbs: kuru and suru. Just memorize them. I learned Japanese by just memorizing. Once you have memorized enough verbs and their conjugations, you can figure out the conjugation of a new verb even if you don't understand how it works.
- throwawayk7h 4mo ago
  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?"
  - klodolph 4mo ago
    They’re sometimes called “semi-irregular” because they are mostly regular with, like, one deviation. The list is not long and it is quick to memorize.
  - deleted 4mo ago
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  - plastic041 4mo ago
    Iku is kinda irregular but it's only itte and itta instead of ite/ita. Also aru/nai is more like antonyms rather than conjugation?
klodolph 4mo ago
:( Romaji are great, and in some ways more instructive because they reveal patterns which are otherwise a little hidden. You just have to realize that S+I is shi, T+U is tsu, etc. I don’t want to get too deep into it but there is a regularity to the language, and rules, and different choices of writing system reveals different pieces of the puzzle. Next, the conjugation itself. There are massive categories of conjugations missing! Like, how do you get from taberu / nomu in this system to tabereru / nomereru? It turns out that these ichidan and godan verbs actually do have some differences in conjugation. Who’d have thought? (There is the -i stem, but there are other forms.)
- danabramov 4mo ago
  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.
yoyonamite 4mo ago
As someone that recently went through an introductory Japanese course in Japan, I don't find this much different than how it's taught. Or maybe I'm missing something? It seems like the article is trying to make the case that in romaji, you can split the letters and isolate the vowel (e.g. the asterix in the article's conjugation). But we were simply taught to change from the う- row to the い- row (u- row to i- row). I switched to Japanese to illustrate that you can make that statement even without romaji. In that case, it seems like basically the same thing? As an anecdotal point, my class was mostly non-english speakers and I didn't find the above to be a sticking point for my classmates. The real sticking points were messing up the ichidan verb exceptions (ichidan verbs that look like godan) and conjugating the correct form for the different grammar points. Te and ta form were also a bit tricky. But the article doesn't seem to offer anything new to help there.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  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.
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laurieg 4mo ago
Here's how I was taught verb conjugation. First, we learnt verbs in the -masu form. Nomimasu, tabemasu and so on. Then we learnt this song (to the tune of Clementine) chi ri i tte mi ni bi nde kiite giite It's a quick mneumonic to help you go from the polite verb to the "te-form" ending. I hummed it in my head while working out the conjugation before it became natural and "obvious".
BigTTYGothGF 4mo ago
Up until just last year "si" "ti' and "tu" were the proper official way to romanize "shi" "chi" and "tsu": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunrei-shiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunrei-shiki
- jaggederest 4mo ago
  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.
  - lmm 4mo ago
    > 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. Erm, wtf? The English "si" sound does exist and sounds different from し. There is a reason people don't want to write Sinzyuku, and while I think they're making the wrong tradeoff, it is a tradeoff and should be acknowledged as such.
    - jaggederest 4mo ago
      "As a result, the sequences [ti si di (d)zi] do not occur in native or Sino-Japanese vocabulary."[1] Unless I'm missing something, Japanese phonology doesn't include the sound english has as "si", only "shi"? I'm not a native speaker though, it's entirely possible that I am missing something. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology
      - lmm 4mo ago
        Ah, you mean those sounds don't exist in (standard) Japanese? I got confused by you talking about "the English equivalent".
masakino 4mo ago
this is quite intriguing, as a native speaker and someone with friends trying to learn Japanese, I always had a hard time explaining all the different patterns and just defaulted to "it just is". Will use this in the future!
lmm 4mo ago
If it's taking you this much effort to do the trivial conjugations (seriously, the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down, and falls back on "yeah, you just have to memorize the patterns" for た/て forms), yeah, just memorise them. Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you; you actually just have to put the time and effort in.
- nine_k 4mo ago
  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.
  - ivm 4mo ago
    Spanish is not that bad: the conjugations are not gendered, while there are fewer than 20 major irregular patterns and about a dozen especially quirky verbs that you have to memorize in a few tenses (there are no 100% irregular verbs, most have at least some regular forms). Source: I develop a conjugation app for a living
    - nine_k 4mo ago
      I suppose that Arabic or Russian may have it much worse.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  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.
eska 4mo ago
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%.
- csande17 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      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.
      - 4mo ago
smburdick 4mo ago
Calling it concatenation is a little misleading. Japanese is known as an agglutinative language [0], and how verbs are conjugated also has a lot to do with politeness, as well as local dialects. That's why you can turn on an anime and hardly understand it, even after a couple years of study. I got to the third year college level in my own Japanese studies, and at that point, memorizing kanji was starting to compete with my computer science studies, so I had to drop it. I got to travel to Japan and live with host families (we kind of settled on a Japanese/English pidgin), so I don't regret the experience. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language
- danabramov 4mo ago
  It’s concatenation with the asterisk, and the asterisk is what we build throughout the article.
rambojohnson 4mo ago
meh, language learning has an inconvenient truth: sometimes it’s just rote memorization. it's the reflexive belief that every human endeavor must have a hidden optimization waiting to be discovered. Language learning is one of those domains that stubbornly replies, "Cool flowchart. Now memorize 500 words and spend 200 hours listening." There’s no clever engineer hack that replaces time spent with the language. and with regard to japanese, please stay away from romaji, unless you're still in beginner stage and typing things out to communicate words you already know the phonetics to.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  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).
kenrick95 4mo ago
One big change I had when learning Japanese was that someone introduced to me Cure Dolly videos on YouTube, and it has been an eye-opener: All these verb conjugations are actually attaching another verb to extend its meaning
refactor_master 4mo ago
> why romaji is actually good It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form. Mu, bu and nu also all obey the -nda transformation due to phonetics, and not due to how "if we just shuffle the letters around and presto! Nomu becomes nonda". Japanese already has plenty of its own reading inconsistencies, so adding another layer on top isn't going to help you. Finally, there's going to be so much kana in your every day life that learning conjugation in romaji is guaranteed to cripple your reading, because instead of recognizing kana (e.g. you see a billboard that says お茶を飲んだ方がいい！ as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go) you've spent the first n hours on trying to "hack" the language instead of just learning it.
- JuniperMesos 4mo ago
  -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.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  > 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.
zaik 4mo ago
I usually just consult my handy sheet of BNF rules while speaking Japanese.
Larrikin 4mo ago
I've found that any resource relying on any romaji after the first chapter or two is often a complete waste of time. It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.
- qingcharles 4mo ago
  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.
  - danabramov 4mo ago
    I explicitly address my reason for choosing it over kana in the article. If you disagree, please engage with the argument that’s already there.
    - eloisant 4mo ago
      The benefit you give (be able to "cut" a kana in the middle) is really weak, I've never seen anyone being confused by that when learning in kana. This is completely nullified by all the drawbacks of using romaji while learning and they're well known already. The only reason to use romaji for Japanese grammar is to explain the concepts to someone who has no interest in learning the language, just for their general knowledge.
      - danabramov 4mo ago
        Part of conceit of my article is that I wanted a person with zero knowledge of Japanese to walk away with ability to conjugate almost any verb to almost any suffix in a single evening. I also wanted the visual notation to work and I don’t consider that motivation weak. Maybe this helps frame it.
59percentmore 4mo ago
Te-form mnemonic (sung to Ba Ba Black Sheep): i chi ri tte bi mi ni nde ki ite gi ite shi shite
- naishoya 4mo ago
  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.
  - JuniperMesos 4mo ago
    I've generally found this kind of thing annoying in my various attempts to learn languages - in one of my high school spanish classes the teacher thought it was important to have us learn a little song to memorize the six present tense forms of the to-be verb ser: (yo) soy, (tu) eres, (el/ella) es, (nosotros) somos, (vosotros) sois, (ellos/as) son. My thinking was, there's only six forms to memorize, and the verb is an incredibly common one ("to be"!) so they'll get constantly reinforced anyway. The song is silly and isn't really helping anyway. I feel similarly about the transformations for the Japanese -te forms and -ta past tense marker. The entire system is: Ichidan: add -te/ta to stem Godan: -u/ru/tsu -tte/tta -su -shite/shita -mu/bu/nu -nde/nda -ku -ite/ita -gu -ide/ida So basically ten patterns which group into 5 subpatterns. There's some logic behind them - the -te and -ta morphemes originally got added to the -i/pre-masu/ren'youkei stem and then underwent some idiosyncratic consonant reductions in godan verbs. But, really, it's only ten patterns, you can just memorize them; and these are incredibly common verb forms that get used all the time so you'll have them reinforced frequently if you are at all engaging with the language. It's a lot less to memorize than if you were learning Ancient Greek or Sanskrit or something.
iluvcommunism 4mo ago
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elpalek 4mo ago
For anyone who is interested in learning Japanese, or looking for resources. I've compiled this "Awesome Japanese" repo. https://github.com/yudataguy/Awesome-Japanese https://github.com/yudataguy/Awesome-Japanese
famahar 4mo ago
The comments to this article are another example of something I see so often in Japanese language learning dicussions I see online. It's always filled with debate, disagreement, arguements over incredible subtle things, and everyone trying to optimize the best method. It can be really discouraging space for early learners.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  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.
- klodolph 4mo ago
  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.
- lmm 4mo ago
  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.
valzevul 4mo ago
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").
- danabramov 4mo ago
  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.
- monadgonad 4mo ago
  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.
  - kazinator 4mo ago
    E.g: > not so lucky and got a "ru" ending? check what vowel before the "ru". it it's one of -aru, -oru, -uru, then it's also a godan verb. Wrong: 煽る (aoru) is ichidan: 煽った、煽りたい、煽らない、煽ろう、煽られる。。。
kazinator 4mo ago
"hanasimasu" is not exactly wrong; there is a romanization system in which "si" is how you write "shi". If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language, it behooves you to adopt "si" and "ti", because they bring in a consistency needed by such a system to be complete.
- thaumasiotes 4mo ago
  > If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language That's how all conjugation schemes work. There's nothing weird about this. Stems aren't supposed to exist in the spoken language. But they are observable in the spoken language. Compare how a modern dictionary will give you ποιέω, a full and fully-inflected word which doesn't actually exist in ancient Greek, as the first principle part of that verb. This is done because the stem of the verb is ποιε-, and the epsilon ending the stem can be easily observed by its effect on most of the conjugational endings. It doesn't happen to affect the first-person singular ending -ω (to be precise, the contraction of ε- with -ω is -ω), so the dictionary form is synthetic, chosen to be informative.
  - kazinator 4mo ago
    I should have said that they don't exist in the written language; but using an alternative one lets them be written. This is why romaji appears handy in this matter. It lets us have a stem ending in "r", which doesn't change when we have "a", "u", etc after it.
    - thaumasiotes 4mo ago
      On the matter of 'si' and 'ti', they are not appropriate in a model of modern Japanese, which recognizes e.g. the onset of ち as a phoneme distinct from the onset of と. The orthography uses a digraph / diacritic for this, writing "ちゅ" for the single syllable that belongs in the -u column of the row containing ち, but that's not a reflection of Japanese phonology; it's a historical artifact. It's still the case that Japanese speakers have difficulty producing the hypothetical sound 'si', but that doesn't mean that the syllable which is notionally given that place in the kana table represents that hypothetical sound. In English we have the very similar rule that the cluster /sj/ may be reduced to /ʃ/, but this obviously doesn't prove that the word "sheep" begins with the phoneme /s/.
kazinator 4mo ago
Funny how some conjugated forms of verbs collide with dictionary forms of other verbs (esp. if we ignore pitch accent differences): E.g. potential of 買う (kau, to buy) is 買える (kaeru), which is spelled like 帰る (kaeru, to return home). It reminds of you how "lay" is a verb (to put something into a flat resting position, but is also the past tense of "to lie" (take on a supine position). Today, I lay bricks; yesterday I lay in bed all day. Plus lie and lie are examples of how English verbs can be homonyms in dictionary form, but conjugate differently, something we see in Japanese (either actual homonyms or near homonyms modulo pitch accent).
jacekm 4mo ago
For me the biggest problem was never memorizing the suffixes but determining whether the verb belongs to group 1 or 2. While you can tell immediately that some verbs belong to group 1, the others (e.g. kaeru mentioned in the post) are not so easy (as far as I know there's no algorithm for that and you just need to memorize with every verb to which group it belongs).
beeforpork 4mo ago
Looks good. It essentially separates phonotactics out of conjugation patterns instead of conflating them, which works also very well with how I learn languages. How to conjugate then breaks down to finding the stem (yes, some learning is always involved), and then there are not even different conjugations, but there are simply vocalic and consonantal stems -- all the morphology is in the suffix (the 'secret vowel') and the rest is phonotactics. I am sure there are irregular verbs, but probably this explains 90% or more of the verbs with simple rules. For me, this creates a perfectly logical system. Thanks for the overview!
zerof1l 4mo ago
Don’t want to sound negative, just want to share my observations as someone who’s been actively learning Japanese for a couple of years. I much prefer how Japanese people actually teach verbs: 一段 (ichidan), literally "1-step"; 五段 (godan), literally "5 steps", plus a few exceptions sometimes called irregular verbs. It's not hard; it makes sense, just some textbooks (e.g. Genki) teach it really bad. Learning Japanese is about learning a new way of thinking and structuring your thoughts. The more you learn, the more you realize it just doesn't fit into the English world. You can't really translate Japanese into English without losing nuance — and sometimes that nuance is important. So start early and start training your brain to think in the language, instead of trying to translate it and force it into English or some other language brackets. It won’t work; it won’t make sense; you will get stressed and confused.
- arunix 4mo ago
  Are there any books you'd recommend that get it right?
  - agnishom 4mo ago
    How about kellenok.github.io/cure-script/ But actually, I prefer the app "human japanese"
  - zerof1l 4mo ago
    Don't know of any books that get it right. I don't think you can get it right the first time, it would be way too complex and technical. Most people would give up on the first lesson. Maybe better to treat it as an iterative process, which is how it's taught actually. First you learn it in some idealized, oversimplified concepts, then you go over them more deeply and pick up more nuance each time. I’d recommend r/LearnJapanese for finding material and ways to study.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  > I much prefer how Japanese people actually teach verbs: 一段 (ichidan), literally "1-step"; 五段 (godan), literally "5 steps", plus a few exceptions sometimes called irregular verbs This is literally what I teach in the article, including these translations. Quoting it: > in ichidan ("one-row") verbs like taberu, the last syllable of the stem is fixed. it's always going to be be, no matter the suffix: > > (table) > > it stays on a single row in the hiragana table, hence "one-row". > >on the other hand, in godan ("five-row") verbs like nomu, the final syllable of the stem alternates between ma, mi, mu, me, and mo: > (table) > it spans all the five rows, which is why it's godan ("five-row"). the m* "wildcard" represents the entire ma/mi/mu/me/mo column. You’re also mischaracterising my approach. I am not teaching to “think in English”. Quoting from the article: > i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table. so this is a reminder to not think in romaji when you do calculations. when we conjugate godan verbs, we literally go up and down the column. (maybe all these textbooks that used hiragana had a point!) If you have objections, please engage with the article’s actual content, not with what you assume it is based on a glance (“oh he’s using romaji, this is thinking in English”). I’m using romaji for specific reasons that are motivated and explained in text, and I show every single pitfall of that choice as well.
tpoacher 4mo ago
A plug for my favourite book here. Richard Webb's 80/20 Japanese covers these topics extremely well, and in a very logical / productive order for a foreign speaker. (and it comes with very enjoyable audio tapes and anki cards to boot) Highly recommended.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  I also really liked the stuff I’ve seen from 80/20! It might have the best explanation of sentence structure that I’ve seen so far.
sevenseacat 4mo ago
As someone who is learning Japanese and is struggling through learning conjugations.... this is not explained simply to me. Maybe it's because I'm at a different part of my learning journey, but this seems to go on and on and on about godan v ichidan verbs but doesn't touch on the actual conjugation (ie. how to turn "drink" into "didn't want to drink"), nor on plain form (everything is in polite form), and te-form gets a very very short mention at the end x_x Also, the romaji did my head in but I understand that was done for a reason (I don't agree with the reason, but at least there was one)
- agnishom 4mo ago
  does this help? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGA6Tj9_lSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGA6Tj9_lSg
- danabramov 4mo ago
  > doesn't touch on the actual conjugation (ie. how to turn "drink" into "didn't want to drink"), nor on plain form (everything is in polite form) The conceit of the article is that it doesn’t teach any meanings, it just teaches “how to append a suffix to a stem”. If this much is obvious to you, that’s fine, the article isn’t useful to you. It was difficult for me to understand ichidan/godan. The article does not attempt to explain how to pick the suffix or what those suffixes mean.
vessenes 4mo ago
Wow, there is a lot of negative gatekeeping on learning Japanese in this thread. I recommend people chill out. Dan, this is cool, and I can tell you enjoyed writing this up and thinking it through as you wrote. Don’t let the haters get you down. I think you’d like Orbit (withorbit.com), a tool that got built out of some experimental learning work I think originally done at quantum.country — it’s intended as a sort of toolkit to help turn blog content into spaced repitition inline memorization tools. Check it out! I think the post would benefit from something like this - it’s fun for most to play with seeing how they are understanding this, and you spend a lot of time trying to create a bit of interactive reading/thinking in the blog. Keep writing, please, it’s good.
- timr 4mo ago
  > Wow, there is a lot of negative gatekeeping on learning Japanese in this thread. I recommend people chill out. Any discussion of Japanese here brings out a lot of extremely defensive nerds. I don't know why this happens more with Japanese, but it sure seems to. I don't have a strong opinion on the post, and I tend to think that if you find something that works for you, when it comes to languages, you should go with it. Far be it from me to tell you that you're wrong for learning how you learn. But that said -- and as others have noted -- the explanation here is misleading, and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration. Japanese conjugation is extremely simple, and the author is missing some essential context that would make it all much clearer. For example: > it's not entirely clear what nomu's stem is. is it nomu? but then, we define stem as the unchanging part — whereas the last vowel seems to alternate, like nomi or noma in some cases. First, there is a clear stem (飲＊), but you just don't know that yet, because you haven't learned kanji [1]. The conjugation is extremely regular, and there's no reason to memorize a bunch of granular rules like this: > む (mu) changes to み (mi) when adding ます（masu) To wit: a godan verb [2] shifts from the "u" sound（う・く・す・つ・ぬ・む・る・ぶ・ぐ / u, ku, su, tsu, nu, mu, ru, bu, gu）to the "i" sound in the same column of the kana table（い・き・し・ち・に・み・り・び・ぎ） when conjugating to the formal (aka "teineigo" / aka "masu"）conjugation. It's one rule. Then, for casual negative conjugations, you shift to the "a" sound in the same column (わ・か・さ・た・な・ま・ら・ば・が). Two rules. Formal past tense, and a bunch of other tenses derive trivially from these (e.g. わかるー＞わからないー＞わからなかった / "I understand", "I don't understand", "I didn't understand"） That covers the conjugations the author cites in the piece, and a few others that he hasn't. However, for past tense or て form, the author's system will actually confuse you (IMO), because the you really do need to have an intuition for kana to know how the conjugations are going to play out. Namely the following rules: る・う・つ becomes って or った (continual or past tense, respectively) く becomes いて or いたす becomes して or したぐ becomes いで or いだぬ・む・ぶ becomes んで or んだ For these, it's really, really, really helpful to just know kana, and how the sounds roll off the tongue. Because if you do, you quickly see that there's really no other way for the first three endings to work out, and require little/no memorization at all. The last rows are the exceptions that you have to learn. But again, it's what...7 rules in total? In the grand scheme of language learning, this is nothing -- and boy, let me tell you, if memorizing seven semi-arbitrary things is a burden for you, Japanese is not your language. Anyway, the point is, I strongly encourage you to learn kana as quickly as possible, and then onto kanji forthwith. The sooner you do this, the sooner all will be made clear! [1] I am using the royal "you" here. I don't know if the author knows kanji and don't care; I'm saying that if a regular person is at this stage of learning Japanese, they will not know many, if any, kanji. [2] Just doing godan verbs here, because ichidan verbs are much simpler. The tricky part of ichidan verbs is knowing which ones they are, which, alas, you mainly just have to memorize. You can sorta-kinda infer that a verb with an "iru" or "eru" ending is ichidan -- it's always true that ichidan verbs end like that! -- but it's a necessary-not-sufficient condition, which, again, requires that you know the kanji to distinguish "without memorization."
purpleflashing 4mo ago
I wonder what the author’s native language is as they seem to struggle with the concept of alternation. For me, the first half of the article could be removed and the learning could simply start with “there are two types of verbs in Japanese (+ some irregular verbs), one type conjugates without alternation in the root, the other with”. That’s enough to get the mental model but my native languages have alternation to begin with so it’s an intuitive concept.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  My native language does have alternation but I don’t want to assume its knowledge so I show it visually. Also, alternation doesn’t always work the same way. In Japanese it’s decided by the suffix but that doesn’t need to be the case. But yes, I am basically describing alternation.
  - purpleflashing 4mo ago
    You don’t explain conjunction in such details as as well and it is not universally present feature in all the languages though. Writing about learning languages is tricky because you cannot write for a universal audience, you have to write for speakers of a particular language (I suppose English in this case, since the article is in English), you’re also lucky if you know whether they have ever learned any other foreign language, and what particular education system they’re coming from (some education systems teach basics of linguistics and its terminology, some don’t — a language teacher might find themselves having a class full of people who have never learned what a clause, subject, object, or conjunction are, who don’t have the mental model to operate with these categories). I don’t speak any Japanese and your explanation was understandable to me (even if there were some redundancies) but I think the negative reaction in the comments is just because of mismatch of your mental model of a language and people’s mental models. I understand you were writing about your own process of filling the gaps (btw, I also find it easier, or at least more fun, to understand the basics of grammar before memorizing all the specific forms), but I think it’s not very clear from the article as some in the comments seemed to expect to learn from it, rather than learn about how you solved a particular obstacle in your learning. I hope I am not coming off as bashing you or your writing. I now regret writing my original comment now that I read all the other replies — it looks like I am your work calling the article redundant, I am sorry for that. I hope you continue writing about your learning path — language learning is fascinating, and the more information we share about how we learn, the easier it is for everyone. And Japanese is a very beautiful language! Kudos to you for tackling it.
johncoltrane 4mo ago
Capitals are good. Use capitals.
lynguist 4mo ago
https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerung/sprachen-religionen/sprachen.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerun... Scroll down to Gelernte Sprachen (=Languages being learned). The data of the Swiss Federal Bureau of Statistics confirms that among languages currently being learned among the residents of Switzerland Japanese comes at 7th rank! It is actively being studied by every 40th person above 25! Everyone is a weeaboo! The ranks are: 1 English (lingua franca of the world) 2 German (administrative language of most of Switzerland) 3 French (administrative language of 1/4 of Switzerland) 4 Italian (big minority language) 5 Spanish (first language with no direct connection to Switzerland) 6 Swiss German (oral language of most of Switzerland) 7 Japanese (everyone is a weeaboo) 8 Portuguese (another language with no direct connection to Switzerland)
etrvic 4mo ago
While we are on the subject of Japanese and since everyone criticises the author, any resource recommendations or otherwise good practices to share with a fellow Japanese learner?
- runarberg 4mo ago
  Since this is HN I may as well pitch my kanji learning app: https://shodoku.app/ https://shodoku.app/ (Github repo: https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku ) If you want to procrastinate actually learning (the HN way): scraping and parsing a couple of dictionaries, stroke samples, and sentence translation repos, setting them up in a local sqlite db and have fun exploring connections in the language with SQL queries. Guaranteed to keep you away from actually learning the language for at least 2 months. In seriousness, I do recommend textbooks above anything else. Structure is your no. 1 friend as you go through the language. Go to r/LearnJapanese to find the right textbook for you. Use apps only complement your learning, SRS is amazing for memorization and Anki is pretty good to optimize your vocab. Same goes for my app Shodoku. Only use it to complement your learning, if you want to learn how to write, write primarily in your notebook and only go through the app to optimize your memory.
deaton 4mo ago
Really cool writeup. I personally like the Cure Dolly approach to conjugation, in which she said there was no such thing as conjugation (at least not in the Indo-European sense), only helper verbs and adjectives. Japanese grammar is just so difficult to understand as a native English speaker. Thanks for sharing.
BalinKing 4mo ago
IIRC linguists (like, actual academic researchers) prefer to “break up” kana and analyze the consonant and vowel separately when dealing with conjugations. Treating kana as indivisible units is AFAIK only really a thing in Japanese linguistics historically done in Japan. All this to say, I’m pretty sure this “just change the vowel” approach is perfectly fine from a theoretical perspective (and as a fellow learner, also very aesthetically satisfying :-) )
sicvita 4mo ago
Agree with others that grouping verbs into -ru and -u verbs is a weird choice that only kicks the can down the road. I get why a textbook like Genki does this, i.e., not wanting to throw terms like 「一段」and 「五段」at people literally a few chapters into their Japanese language learning journey, but it just muddies the waters. Like so much pedagogy, this feels like a good example of "hey, here's a quick-and-dirty heuristic for how this thing works, but just keep in mind that we'll explain how it really works later on". Except Genki I+II never mentions the terms 「一段」or「五段」at all. (it's similarly criminal that they never introduce pitch accent either, but that's another story). My advice to anyone getting started with Japanese would be to get out of the introductory textbook stage as quickly as possible. Supplement with grammar explanations from other resources early on. Cure Dolly, Imabi.net, Tofugu, YouTubers, LLMs--whatever clicks with you. I'm just glad that early in my learning journey, I heard a YouTuber describe Japanese as "agglutinative" (with a comparison to German)--a term I'd never encountered before. A light bulb went off for me and things started to click. In any event, glad to see this kind of article kick off discussion/debate :D. 皆さんは、頑張りましょう！

160 points by valzevul 4mo ago

holistio 4mo ago

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

mc3301 4mo ago
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.
- holistio 4mo ago
  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.
  - danabramov 4mo ago
    Thanks! Feels like the only person on this page who gets what I was going for.
    - iainmerrick 4mo ago
      I'm a bit dismayed by all the negativity you're getting. Thanks for all your level-headed and detailed responses here. I have a hard time understanding why people object to this kind of attempt to systematize something that conventionally relies on rote learning. I've always found that figuring out the underlying rules helps with the rote learning. When you see some new word or conjugation, it's super helpful to have a method for explaining why it's that way; it helps fix it in your mind. I wonder if native speakers object to this approach because it isn't really how you learn as a kid. You don't learn any abstract rules, you just absorb a huge amount of training material and construct your own model. But that doesn't mean adults need to learn in the same way; we can and should leverage our painfully-acquired knowledge and skills from other domains.
      - danabramov 4mo ago
        FWIW I actually haven’t seen negative feedback from the native speakers I’ve shared it with. (Maybe they didn’t want to upset me! I don’t know :)
        iainmerrick 4mo ago
        Well, the native speakers or otherwise self-diagnosed experts who felt obliged to chip in here!
  - mc3301 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
  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.

wren6991 4mo ago

> now let's try to apply the rules: > hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!) I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as し on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi". I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.

donw 4mo ago
Um... 話します is the correct conjugation for 話す, what am I missing here?
- klodolph 4mo ago
  hanasimasu = 話します
  - donw 4mo ago
    I also still don't understand why the author thought this was wrong?
    - klodolph 4mo ago
      Because the author of the article hasn’t internalized that si is pronounced “shi”, is my guess.
      - danabramov 4mo ago
        The article literally says: > there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. […] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. […] i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
        4mo ago

plastic041 4mo ago

Categorizing Japanese verbs as -ru or -u requires more context. I prefer the term "group 2 verbs" to "-ru verbs." Group 2 verbs are verbs that end in -eru or -iru, not just -ru. Of course there are some exceptions, like kaeru, which ends in -eru but is actually a -u verb. Conjugation is easy: remove the final -ru and append -masu, -mashita, etc. "Group 1 verbs" (again, -u verbs) are verbs that are not group 2 verbs. Conjugation is a bit more difficult because the -nu, -bu, -mu, and -u verbs have many suffixes. However, after memorizing these two (-nbmu and -u, because -nu, -bu, and -mu are almost the same), the rest are easy. There are only two irregular verbs: kuru and suru. Just memorize them. I learned Japanese by just memorizing. Once you have memorized enough verbs and their conjugations, you can figure out the conjugation of a new verb even if you don't understand how it works.

throwawayk7h 4mo ago
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?"
- klodolph 4mo ago
  They’re sometimes called “semi-irregular” because they are mostly regular with, like, one deviation. The list is not long and it is quick to memorize.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- plastic041 4mo ago
  Iku is kinda irregular but it's only itte and itta instead of ite/ita. Also aru/nai is more like antonyms rather than conjugation?

klodolph 4mo ago

:( Romaji are great, and in some ways more instructive because they reveal patterns which are otherwise a little hidden. You just have to realize that S+I is shi, T+U is tsu, etc. I don’t want to get too deep into it but there is a regularity to the language, and rules, and different choices of writing system reveals different pieces of the puzzle. Next, the conjugation itself. There are massive categories of conjugations missing! Like, how do you get from taberu / nomu in this system to tabereru / nomereru? It turns out that these ichidan and godan verbs actually do have some differences in conjugation. Who’d have thought? (There is the -i stem, but there are other forms.)

danabramov 4mo ago
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.

yoyonamite 4mo ago

As someone that recently went through an introductory Japanese course in Japan, I don't find this much different than how it's taught. Or maybe I'm missing something? It seems like the article is trying to make the case that in romaji, you can split the letters and isolate the vowel (e.g. the asterix in the article's conjugation). But we were simply taught to change from the う- row to the い- row (u- row to i- row). I switched to Japanese to illustrate that you can make that statement even without romaji. In that case, it seems like basically the same thing? As an anecdotal point, my class was mostly non-english speakers and I didn't find the above to be a sticking point for my classmates. The real sticking points were messing up the ichidan verb exceptions (ichidan verbs that look like godan) and conjugating the correct form for the different grammar points. Te and ta form were also a bit tricky. But the article doesn't seem to offer anything new to help there.

danabramov 4mo ago
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.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

laurieg 4mo ago

Here's how I was taught verb conjugation. First, we learnt verbs in the -masu form. Nomimasu, tabemasu and so on. Then we learnt this song (to the tune of Clementine) chi ri i tte mi ni bi nde kiite giite It's a quick mneumonic to help you go from the polite verb to the "te-form" ending. I hummed it in my head while working out the conjugation before it became natural and "obvious".

BigTTYGothGF 4mo ago

Up until just last year "si" "ti' and "tu" were the proper official way to romanize "shi" "chi" and "tsu": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunrei-shiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunrei-shiki

jaggederest 4mo ago
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.
- lmm 4mo ago
  > 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. Erm, wtf? The English "si" sound does exist and sounds different from し. There is a reason people don't want to write Sinzyuku, and while I think they're making the wrong tradeoff, it is a tradeoff and should be acknowledged as such.
  - jaggederest 4mo ago
    "As a result, the sequences [ti si di (d)zi] do not occur in native or Sino-Japanese vocabulary."[1] Unless I'm missing something, Japanese phonology doesn't include the sound english has as "si", only "shi"? I'm not a native speaker though, it's entirely possible that I am missing something. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology
    - lmm 4mo ago
      Ah, you mean those sounds don't exist in (standard) Japanese? I got confused by you talking about "the English equivalent".

masakino 4mo ago

this is quite intriguing, as a native speaker and someone with friends trying to learn Japanese, I always had a hard time explaining all the different patterns and just defaulted to "it just is". Will use this in the future!

lmm 4mo ago

If it's taking you this much effort to do the trivial conjugations (seriously, the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down, and falls back on "yeah, you just have to memorize the patterns" for た/て forms), yeah, just memorise them. Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you; you actually just have to put the time and effort in.

nine_k 4mo ago
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.
- ivm 4mo ago
  Spanish is not that bad: the conjugations are not gendered, while there are fewer than 20 major irregular patterns and about a dozen especially quirky verbs that you have to memorize in a few tenses (there are no 100% irregular verbs, most have at least some regular forms). Source: I develop a conjugation app for a living
  - nine_k 4mo ago
    I suppose that Arabic or Russian may have it much worse.
danabramov 4mo ago
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.

eska 4mo ago

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%.

csande17 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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.
    - 4mo ago

smburdick 4mo ago

Calling it concatenation is a little misleading. Japanese is known as an agglutinative language [0], and how verbs are conjugated also has a lot to do with politeness, as well as local dialects. That's why you can turn on an anime and hardly understand it, even after a couple years of study. I got to the third year college level in my own Japanese studies, and at that point, memorizing kanji was starting to compete with my computer science studies, so I had to drop it. I got to travel to Japan and live with host families (we kind of settled on a Japanese/English pidgin), so I don't regret the experience. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language

danabramov 4mo ago
It’s concatenation with the asterisk, and the asterisk is what we build throughout the article.

rambojohnson 4mo ago

meh, language learning has an inconvenient truth: sometimes it’s just rote memorization. it's the reflexive belief that every human endeavor must have a hidden optimization waiting to be discovered. Language learning is one of those domains that stubbornly replies, "Cool flowchart. Now memorize 500 words and spend 200 hours listening." There’s no clever engineer hack that replaces time spent with the language. and with regard to japanese, please stay away from romaji, unless you're still in beginner stage and typing things out to communicate words you already know the phonetics to.

danabramov 4mo ago
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).

kenrick95 4mo ago

One big change I had when learning Japanese was that someone introduced to me Cure Dolly videos on YouTube, and it has been an eye-opener: All these verb conjugations are actually attaching another verb to extend its meaning

refactor_master 4mo ago

> why romaji is actually good It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form. Mu, bu and nu also all obey the -nda transformation due to phonetics, and not due to how "if we just shuffle the letters around and presto! Nomu becomes nonda". Japanese already has plenty of its own reading inconsistencies, so adding another layer on top isn't going to help you. Finally, there's going to be so much kana in your every day life that learning conjugation in romaji is guaranteed to cripple your reading, because instead of recognizing kana (e.g. you see a billboard that says お茶を飲んだ方がいい！ as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go) you've spent the first n hours on trying to "hack" the language instead of just learning it.

JuniperMesos 4mo ago
-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.
danabramov 4mo ago
> 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.

zaik 4mo ago

I usually just consult my handy sheet of BNF rules while speaking Japanese.

Larrikin 4mo ago

I've found that any resource relying on any romaji after the first chapter or two is often a complete waste of time. It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.

qingcharles 4mo ago
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.
- danabramov 4mo ago
  I explicitly address my reason for choosing it over kana in the article. If you disagree, please engage with the argument that’s already there.
  - eloisant 4mo ago
    The benefit you give (be able to "cut" a kana in the middle) is really weak, I've never seen anyone being confused by that when learning in kana. This is completely nullified by all the drawbacks of using romaji while learning and they're well known already. The only reason to use romaji for Japanese grammar is to explain the concepts to someone who has no interest in learning the language, just for their general knowledge.
    - danabramov 4mo ago
      Part of conceit of my article is that I wanted a person with zero knowledge of Japanese to walk away with ability to conjugate almost any verb to almost any suffix in a single evening. I also wanted the visual notation to work and I don’t consider that motivation weak. Maybe this helps frame it.

59percentmore 4mo ago

Te-form mnemonic (sung to Ba Ba Black Sheep): i chi ri tte bi mi ni nde ki ite gi ite shi shite

naishoya 4mo ago
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.
- JuniperMesos 4mo ago
  I've generally found this kind of thing annoying in my various attempts to learn languages - in one of my high school spanish classes the teacher thought it was important to have us learn a little song to memorize the six present tense forms of the to-be verb ser: (yo) soy, (tu) eres, (el/ella) es, (nosotros) somos, (vosotros) sois, (ellos/as) son. My thinking was, there's only six forms to memorize, and the verb is an incredibly common one ("to be"!) so they'll get constantly reinforced anyway. The song is silly and isn't really helping anyway. I feel similarly about the transformations for the Japanese -te forms and -ta past tense marker. The entire system is: Ichidan: add -te/ta to stem Godan: -u/ru/tsu -tte/tta -su -shite/shita -mu/bu/nu -nde/nda -ku -ite/ita -gu -ide/ida So basically ten patterns which group into 5 subpatterns. There's some logic behind them - the -te and -ta morphemes originally got added to the -i/pre-masu/ren'youkei stem and then underwent some idiosyncratic consonant reductions in godan verbs. But, really, it's only ten patterns, you can just memorize them; and these are incredibly common verb forms that get used all the time so you'll have them reinforced frequently if you are at all engaging with the language. It's a lot less to memorize than if you were learning Ancient Greek or Sanskrit or something.

iluvcommunism 4mo ago

[dead]

elpalek 4mo ago

For anyone who is interested in learning Japanese, or looking for resources. I've compiled this "Awesome Japanese" repo. https://github.com/yudataguy/Awesome-Japanese https://github.com/yudataguy/Awesome-Japanese

famahar 4mo ago

The comments to this article are another example of something I see so often in Japanese language learning dicussions I see online. It's always filled with debate, disagreement, arguements over incredible subtle things, and everyone trying to optimize the best method. It can be really discouraging space for early learners.

danabramov 4mo ago
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.
klodolph 4mo ago
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.
lmm 4mo ago
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.

valzevul 4mo ago

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").

danabramov 4mo ago
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.
monadgonad 4mo ago
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.
- kazinator 4mo ago
  E.g: > not so lucky and got a "ru" ending? check what vowel before the "ru". it it's one of -aru, -oru, -uru, then it's also a godan verb. Wrong: 煽る (aoru) is ichidan: 煽った、煽りたい、煽らない、煽ろう、煽られる。。。

kazinator 4mo ago

"hanasimasu" is not exactly wrong; there is a romanization system in which "si" is how you write "shi". If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language, it behooves you to adopt "si" and "ti", because they bring in a consistency needed by such a system to be complete.

thaumasiotes 4mo ago
> If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language That's how all conjugation schemes work. There's nothing weird about this. Stems aren't supposed to exist in the spoken language. But they are observable in the spoken language. Compare how a modern dictionary will give you ποιέω, a full and fully-inflected word which doesn't actually exist in ancient Greek, as the first principle part of that verb. This is done because the stem of the verb is ποιε-, and the epsilon ending the stem can be easily observed by its effect on most of the conjugational endings. It doesn't happen to affect the first-person singular ending -ω (to be precise, the contraction of ε- with -ω is -ω), so the dictionary form is synthetic, chosen to be informative.
- kazinator 4mo ago
  I should have said that they don't exist in the written language; but using an alternative one lets them be written. This is why romaji appears handy in this matter. It lets us have a stem ending in "r", which doesn't change when we have "a", "u", etc after it.
  - thaumasiotes 4mo ago
    On the matter of 'si' and 'ti', they are not appropriate in a model of modern Japanese, which recognizes e.g. the onset of ち as a phoneme distinct from the onset of と. The orthography uses a digraph / diacritic for this, writing "ちゅ" for the single syllable that belongs in the -u column of the row containing ち, but that's not a reflection of Japanese phonology; it's a historical artifact. It's still the case that Japanese speakers have difficulty producing the hypothetical sound 'si', but that doesn't mean that the syllable which is notionally given that place in the kana table represents that hypothetical sound. In English we have the very similar rule that the cluster /sj/ may be reduced to /ʃ/, but this obviously doesn't prove that the word "sheep" begins with the phoneme /s/.

kazinator 4mo ago

Funny how some conjugated forms of verbs collide with dictionary forms of other verbs (esp. if we ignore pitch accent differences): E.g. potential of 買う (kau, to buy) is 買える (kaeru), which is spelled like 帰る (kaeru, to return home). It reminds of you how "lay" is a verb (to put something into a flat resting position, but is also the past tense of "to lie" (take on a supine position). Today, I lay bricks; yesterday I lay in bed all day. Plus lie and lie are examples of how English verbs can be homonyms in dictionary form, but conjugate differently, something we see in Japanese (either actual homonyms or near homonyms modulo pitch accent).

jacekm 4mo ago

For me the biggest problem was never memorizing the suffixes but determining whether the verb belongs to group 1 or 2. While you can tell immediately that some verbs belong to group 1, the others (e.g. kaeru mentioned in the post) are not so easy (as far as I know there's no algorithm for that and you just need to memorize with every verb to which group it belongs).

beeforpork 4mo ago

Looks good. It essentially separates phonotactics out of conjugation patterns instead of conflating them, which works also very well with how I learn languages. How to conjugate then breaks down to finding the stem (yes, some learning is always involved), and then there are not even different conjugations, but there are simply vocalic and consonantal stems -- all the morphology is in the suffix (the 'secret vowel') and the rest is phonotactics. I am sure there are irregular verbs, but probably this explains 90% or more of the verbs with simple rules. For me, this creates a perfectly logical system. Thanks for the overview!

zerof1l 4mo ago

Don’t want to sound negative, just want to share my observations as someone who’s been actively learning Japanese for a couple of years. I much prefer how Japanese people actually teach verbs: 一段 (ichidan), literally "1-step"; 五段 (godan), literally "5 steps", plus a few exceptions sometimes called irregular verbs. It's not hard; it makes sense, just some textbooks (e.g. Genki) teach it really bad. Learning Japanese is about learning a new way of thinking and structuring your thoughts. The more you learn, the more you realize it just doesn't fit into the English world. You can't really translate Japanese into English without losing nuance — and sometimes that nuance is important. So start early and start training your brain to think in the language, instead of trying to translate it and force it into English or some other language brackets. It won’t work; it won’t make sense; you will get stressed and confused.

arunix 4mo ago
Are there any books you'd recommend that get it right?
- agnishom 4mo ago
  How about kellenok.github.io/cure-script/ But actually, I prefer the app "human japanese"
- zerof1l 4mo ago
  Don't know of any books that get it right. I don't think you can get it right the first time, it would be way too complex and technical. Most people would give up on the first lesson. Maybe better to treat it as an iterative process, which is how it's taught actually. First you learn it in some idealized, oversimplified concepts, then you go over them more deeply and pick up more nuance each time. I’d recommend r/LearnJapanese for finding material and ways to study.
danabramov 4mo ago
> I much prefer how Japanese people actually teach verbs: 一段 (ichidan), literally "1-step"; 五段 (godan), literally "5 steps", plus a few exceptions sometimes called irregular verbs This is literally what I teach in the article, including these translations. Quoting it: > in ichidan ("one-row") verbs like taberu, the last syllable of the stem is fixed. it's always going to be be, no matter the suffix: > > (table) > > it stays on a single row in the hiragana table, hence "one-row". > >on the other hand, in godan ("five-row") verbs like nomu, the final syllable of the stem alternates between ma, mi, mu, me, and mo: > (table) > it spans all the five rows, which is why it's godan ("five-row"). the m* "wildcard" represents the entire ma/mi/mu/me/mo column. You’re also mischaracterising my approach. I am not teaching to “think in English”. Quoting from the article: > i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table. so this is a reminder to not think in romaji when you do calculations. when we conjugate godan verbs, we literally go up and down the column. (maybe all these textbooks that used hiragana had a point!) If you have objections, please engage with the article’s actual content, not with what you assume it is based on a glance (“oh he’s using romaji, this is thinking in English”). I’m using romaji for specific reasons that are motivated and explained in text, and I show every single pitfall of that choice as well.

tpoacher 4mo ago

A plug for my favourite book here. Richard Webb's 80/20 Japanese covers these topics extremely well, and in a very logical / productive order for a foreign speaker. (and it comes with very enjoyable audio tapes and anki cards to boot) Highly recommended.

danabramov 4mo ago
I also really liked the stuff I’ve seen from 80/20! It might have the best explanation of sentence structure that I’ve seen so far.

sevenseacat 4mo ago

As someone who is learning Japanese and is struggling through learning conjugations.... this is not explained simply to me. Maybe it's because I'm at a different part of my learning journey, but this seems to go on and on and on about godan v ichidan verbs but doesn't touch on the actual conjugation (ie. how to turn "drink" into "didn't want to drink"), nor on plain form (everything is in polite form), and te-form gets a very very short mention at the end x_x Also, the romaji did my head in but I understand that was done for a reason (I don't agree with the reason, but at least there was one)

agnishom 4mo ago
does this help? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGA6Tj9_lSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGA6Tj9_lSg
danabramov 4mo ago
> doesn't touch on the actual conjugation (ie. how to turn "drink" into "didn't want to drink"), nor on plain form (everything is in polite form) The conceit of the article is that it doesn’t teach any meanings, it just teaches “how to append a suffix to a stem”. If this much is obvious to you, that’s fine, the article isn’t useful to you. It was difficult for me to understand ichidan/godan. The article does not attempt to explain how to pick the suffix or what those suffixes mean.

vessenes 4mo ago

Wow, there is a lot of negative gatekeeping on learning Japanese in this thread. I recommend people chill out. Dan, this is cool, and I can tell you enjoyed writing this up and thinking it through as you wrote. Don’t let the haters get you down. I think you’d like Orbit (withorbit.com), a tool that got built out of some experimental learning work I think originally done at quantum.country — it’s intended as a sort of toolkit to help turn blog content into spaced repitition inline memorization tools. Check it out! I think the post would benefit from something like this - it’s fun for most to play with seeing how they are understanding this, and you spend a lot of time trying to create a bit of interactive reading/thinking in the blog. Keep writing, please, it’s good.

timr 4mo ago
> Wow, there is a lot of negative gatekeeping on learning Japanese in this thread. I recommend people chill out. Any discussion of Japanese here brings out a lot of extremely defensive nerds. I don't know why this happens more with Japanese, but it sure seems to. I don't have a strong opinion on the post, and I tend to think that if you find something that works for you, when it comes to languages, you should go with it. Far be it from me to tell you that you're wrong for learning how you learn. But that said -- and as others have noted -- the explanation here is misleading, and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration. Japanese conjugation is extremely simple, and the author is missing some essential context that would make it all much clearer. For example: > it's not entirely clear what nomu's stem is. is it nomu? but then, we define stem as the unchanging part — whereas the last vowel seems to alternate, like nomi or noma in some cases. First, there is a clear stem (飲＊), but you just don't know that yet, because you haven't learned kanji [1]. The conjugation is extremely regular, and there's no reason to memorize a bunch of granular rules like this: > む (mu) changes to み (mi) when adding ます（masu) To wit: a godan verb [2] shifts from the "u" sound（う・く・す・つ・ぬ・む・る・ぶ・ぐ / u, ku, su, tsu, nu, mu, ru, bu, gu）to the "i" sound in the same column of the kana table（い・き・し・ち・に・み・り・び・ぎ） when conjugating to the formal (aka "teineigo" / aka "masu"）conjugation. It's one rule. Then, for casual negative conjugations, you shift to the "a" sound in the same column (わ・か・さ・た・な・ま・ら・ば・が). Two rules. Formal past tense, and a bunch of other tenses derive trivially from these (e.g. わかるー＞わからないー＞わからなかった / "I understand", "I don't understand", "I didn't understand"） That covers the conjugations the author cites in the piece, and a few others that he hasn't. However, for past tense or て form, the author's system will actually confuse you (IMO), because the you really do need to have an intuition for kana to know how the conjugations are going to play out. Namely the following rules: る・う・つ becomes って or った (continual or past tense, respectively) く becomes いて or いたす becomes して or したぐ becomes いで or いだぬ・む・ぶ becomes んで or んだ For these, it's really, really, really helpful to just know kana, and how the sounds roll off the tongue. Because if you do, you quickly see that there's really no other way for the first three endings to work out, and require little/no memorization at all. The last rows are the exceptions that you have to learn. But again, it's what...7 rules in total? In the grand scheme of language learning, this is nothing -- and boy, let me tell you, if memorizing seven semi-arbitrary things is a burden for you, Japanese is not your language. Anyway, the point is, I strongly encourage you to learn kana as quickly as possible, and then onto kanji forthwith. The sooner you do this, the sooner all will be made clear! [1] I am using the royal "you" here. I don't know if the author knows kanji and don't care; I'm saying that if a regular person is at this stage of learning Japanese, they will not know many, if any, kanji. [2] Just doing godan verbs here, because ichidan verbs are much simpler. The tricky part of ichidan verbs is knowing which ones they are, which, alas, you mainly just have to memorize. You can sorta-kinda infer that a verb with an "iru" or "eru" ending is ichidan -- it's always true that ichidan verbs end like that! -- but it's a necessary-not-sufficient condition, which, again, requires that you know the kanji to distinguish "without memorization."

purpleflashing 4mo ago

I wonder what the author’s native language is as they seem to struggle with the concept of alternation. For me, the first half of the article could be removed and the learning could simply start with “there are two types of verbs in Japanese (+ some irregular verbs), one type conjugates without alternation in the root, the other with”. That’s enough to get the mental model but my native languages have alternation to begin with so it’s an intuitive concept.

danabramov 4mo ago
My native language does have alternation but I don’t want to assume its knowledge so I show it visually. Also, alternation doesn’t always work the same way. In Japanese it’s decided by the suffix but that doesn’t need to be the case. But yes, I am basically describing alternation.
- purpleflashing 4mo ago
  You don’t explain conjunction in such details as as well and it is not universally present feature in all the languages though. Writing about learning languages is tricky because you cannot write for a universal audience, you have to write for speakers of a particular language (I suppose English in this case, since the article is in English), you’re also lucky if you know whether they have ever learned any other foreign language, and what particular education system they’re coming from (some education systems teach basics of linguistics and its terminology, some don’t — a language teacher might find themselves having a class full of people who have never learned what a clause, subject, object, or conjunction are, who don’t have the mental model to operate with these categories). I don’t speak any Japanese and your explanation was understandable to me (even if there were some redundancies) but I think the negative reaction in the comments is just because of mismatch of your mental model of a language and people’s mental models. I understand you were writing about your own process of filling the gaps (btw, I also find it easier, or at least more fun, to understand the basics of grammar before memorizing all the specific forms), but I think it’s not very clear from the article as some in the comments seemed to expect to learn from it, rather than learn about how you solved a particular obstacle in your learning. I hope I am not coming off as bashing you or your writing. I now regret writing my original comment now that I read all the other replies — it looks like I am your work calling the article redundant, I am sorry for that. I hope you continue writing about your learning path — language learning is fascinating, and the more information we share about how we learn, the easier it is for everyone. And Japanese is a very beautiful language! Kudos to you for tackling it.

johncoltrane 4mo ago

Capitals are good. Use capitals.

lynguist 4mo ago

https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerung/sprachen-religionen/sprachen.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerun... Scroll down to Gelernte Sprachen (=Languages being learned). The data of the Swiss Federal Bureau of Statistics confirms that among languages currently being learned among the residents of Switzerland Japanese comes at 7th rank! It is actively being studied by every 40th person above 25! Everyone is a weeaboo! The ranks are: 1 English (lingua franca of the world) 2 German (administrative language of most of Switzerland) 3 French (administrative language of 1/4 of Switzerland) 4 Italian (big minority language) 5 Spanish (first language with no direct connection to Switzerland) 6 Swiss German (oral language of most of Switzerland) 7 Japanese (everyone is a weeaboo) 8 Portuguese (another language with no direct connection to Switzerland)

etrvic 4mo ago

While we are on the subject of Japanese and since everyone criticises the author, any resource recommendations or otherwise good practices to share with a fellow Japanese learner?

runarberg 4mo ago
Since this is HN I may as well pitch my kanji learning app: https://shodoku.app/ https://shodoku.app/ (Github repo: https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku ) If you want to procrastinate actually learning (the HN way): scraping and parsing a couple of dictionaries, stroke samples, and sentence translation repos, setting them up in a local sqlite db and have fun exploring connections in the language with SQL queries. Guaranteed to keep you away from actually learning the language for at least 2 months. In seriousness, I do recommend textbooks above anything else. Structure is your no. 1 friend as you go through the language. Go to r/LearnJapanese to find the right textbook for you. Use apps only complement your learning, SRS is amazing for memorization and Anki is pretty good to optimize your vocab. Same goes for my app Shodoku. Only use it to complement your learning, if you want to learn how to write, write primarily in your notebook and only go through the app to optimize your memory.

deaton 4mo ago

Really cool writeup. I personally like the Cure Dolly approach to conjugation, in which she said there was no such thing as conjugation (at least not in the Indo-European sense), only helper verbs and adjectives. Japanese grammar is just so difficult to understand as a native English speaker. Thanks for sharing.

BalinKing 4mo ago

IIRC linguists (like, actual academic researchers) prefer to “break up” kana and analyze the consonant and vowel separately when dealing with conjugations. Treating kana as indivisible units is AFAIK only really a thing in Japanese linguistics historically done in Japan. All this to say, I’m pretty sure this “just change the vowel” approach is perfectly fine from a theoretical perspective (and as a fellow learner, also very aesthetically satisfying :-) )

sicvita 4mo ago

Agree with others that grouping verbs into -ru and -u verbs is a weird choice that only kicks the can down the road. I get why a textbook like Genki does this, i.e., not wanting to throw terms like 「一段」and 「五段」at people literally a few chapters into their Japanese language learning journey, but it just muddies the waters. Like so much pedagogy, this feels like a good example of "hey, here's a quick-and-dirty heuristic for how this thing works, but just keep in mind that we'll explain how it really works later on". Except Genki I+II never mentions the terms 「一段」or「五段」at all. (it's similarly criminal that they never introduce pitch accent either, but that's another story). My advice to anyone getting started with Japanese would be to get out of the introductory textbook stage as quickly as possible. Supplement with grammar explanations from other resources early on. Cure Dolly, Imabi.net, Tofugu, YouTubers, LLMs--whatever clicks with you. I'm just glad that early in my learning journey, I heard a YouTuber describe Japanese as "agglutinative" (with a comparison to German)--a term I'd never encountered before. A light bulb went off for me and things started to click. In any event, glad to see this kind of article kick off discussion/debate :D. 皆さんは、頑張りましょう！