danabramov

9 ms·

91.
by danabramov 4mo ago
>the explanation here is misleading Misleading means it leads to a wrong conclusion somewhere. Please demonstrate which wrong conclusion my article is leading to. >and that's because of the dependence on romaji / translit
92.
by danabramov 4mo ago
Intuitively I suspect that you severely underestimate how many people give up on the language somewhere in the middle of the process of learning this "basic part" in the traditional way. My aim was to show to this group that you c
93.
by danabramov 4mo ago
> have some ideas about what works for language learners that is not expressed by language learners experts. This seems like a culture clash. In programming blogging, it is completely fine to write blog posts about the mental model th
94.
by danabramov 4mo ago
I genuinely don't understand where our disconnect is. To me, “this just works for me, personally” and “this my unorthodox method of teaching/explaining conjunctions in Japanese” is the same thing. It's just my style of writin
95.
by danabramov 4mo ago
Can you just explain what you’re trying to say. I genuinely don’t understand your point. What is my mistake?
96.
by danabramov 4mo ago
My interpretation is that there’s a lot of dogma around how Japanese “should” be learned, in particularly among the English-speaking community. This dogma includes things like “you must learn kana first”, so a romaji-centered article trigge
97.
by danabramov 4mo ago
> if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”. This is literally what my post
98.
by danabramov 4mo ago
Let’s just call it a blog post. I used the word “teaching” loosely and didn’t mean to hit a nerve. If somebody else called a carefully assembled sequence of learning units teaching, I wouldn’t blink an eye at that, so I applied this to the
99.
by danabramov 4mo ago
Ordering topics by strict topological sorting with no cyclical dependencies, ensuring that there's a consistent picture built with each step, and that this picture monotonically converges towards the correct model as you move towards t
100.
by danabramov 4mo ago
All of that makes sense to me — I think we’re in agreement here! You can see it as a somewhat speculative theory that nevertheless is self-consistent and may be helpful to some people.
101.
by danabramov 4mo ago
I'm saying that there's a subset of people (people like me) who find this approach enjoyable. Maybe you find it difficult to believe; that's cool. I'm not here to litigate whether these people exist. I didn't write
102.
by danabramov 4mo ago
"Headcanon" implies I made it up and it's plain incorrect. Now we seem to be litigating that it's correct within its scope but the pedagogical approach is unsound? I'm not saying that I wrote this article for everyo
103.
by danabramov 4mo ago
I'm familiar with teaching. It's in a different space (programming) but I've done plenty of highly successful educational writing before. I understand what you're saying and again — I'm claiming that I've rigor
104.
by danabramov 4mo ago
>This is a pretty long blog post covering really not very much. Fine, it's too verbose for you. I like this pacing and level of verbosity for my own learning. I wrote it for people like me. >At the very end you point to condit
105.
by danabramov 4mo ago
I don't mind some bashing but your comments actually read relatively warm to me — no worries about the tone. Re: expectations, it's a tricky thing. I think it's a bit unfair to say that this particular serialization of concep
106.
by danabramov 4mo ago
>So if the pitch is, “this system works for teaching English speakers off the street how to conjugate verbs in Japanese” it seems to me like the goal is a little artificial and maybe not representative. I never claimed it's repres
107.
by danabramov 4mo ago
I don't actually disagree that you should learn kana early. I just didn't want it to "block" the article because I genuinely believe learning kana can be done in parallel with understanding verb conjugation. There is n
108.
by danabramov 4mo ago
Ah, I see your point. I agree 100% that a system doesn’t help you get fluent, and you need to mix all kinds of activities, most of all including actually using the language to form thoughts and respond to thoughts in realtime. I didn’t mean
109.
by danabramov 4mo ago
The linguistic article I linked to at the bottom directly deals with that so I invite you to check it out. Yes, romaji with a color-coded hole may be a plebe’s choice to render the stem, but the stem itself is a reality of the spoken langua
110.
by 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.
111.
by 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 mea
112.
by danabramov 4mo ago
Clearly you and I learn differently. If I need to apply suffixes correctly, I want to understand how to do it predictably without learning every single form for every single word. Even if patterns coalesce in my mind into an intuition later
113.
by danabramov 4mo ago
I 100% agree with that actually. But I find that my lookup table resists adding things to it until there’s a known fallback algorithm. There’s also joy in seeing the system’s elegance. That’s what I wanted to share by writing.
114.
by 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 ye
115.
by 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
116.
by danabramov 4mo ago
“Romaji” in Wikipedia literally redirects to “Romanization of Japanese” which says “This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji”. It sounds like your effort might be better spent fixing those problems in Wikipedia
117.
by danabramov 4mo ago
Maybe it helps to explain the purpose of the article. My purpose is to help people who have fallen off originally with traditional approaches by showing an alternative way to build up the intuition. This precise order of layering is what I
118.
by danabramov 4mo ago
“Don’t want to sound negative […] I much prefer” reads to me like a comment phrased against the article’s approach. Otherwise why would it “sound negative”? And what I’m saying is that it matches the article’s approach. Thus, the assump
119.
by danabramov 4mo ago
Sure. I like Cure Dolly. I’m actually surprised you bring her up because she gets a lot of purist haters too. I’ve found this lesson difficult to digest when I tried her approach. It’s actually where I fell off and lost the interest the fir
120.
by danabramov 4mo ago
I’ve already conceded in sibling comments that saying “romaji” to mean “Hepburn romaji” specifically is technically imprecise. Note I still do explicitly mention other romanization systems, want to stay consistent within the article, and do

More ›