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.
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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.
> Forms like the imperative (食べろ), volitional (食べよう), provisional (食べれば), potential (食べられる), and causative (食べさせる) aren't cleanly handled either -- they work similarly for godan verbs, but you have to add a different suffix for ichidan verbs.
They are cleanly handled in the final section (“one more thing”) that introduces a notion of disappearing consonant like -[r]u, -[r]eba and so on, and gives a rule for it. This is a perfect inversion of what happens with -(i)masu and friends. The hole in the stem accepts the leading vowel but burns down the leading consonant.
It’s quite elegant.
"Disappearing consonant" doesn't work for the potential form, unless you expand the representation to allow writing -[rar]eru. (Edit: And I think imperative would require like "-[ro](e)".)
Which, like, is clean in the sense that Redux is technically Turing-complete (you can encompass _any_ difference between two strings by saying that one string uses the stuff in brackets and the other string uses the stuff in parentheses), but that doesn't make it a good idea.
Okay, that one’s fair! I remember there was also some other one that had it split into two completely different suffixes.
My answer to this is that by the time you’re learning those, you’re already so fluent in conjugation that a couple of special cases will layer on fine. It’s way better then you get in most languages. (And pedantically I’d still say [] works for the cases above, as you’ve shown.)
I honestly don’t understand the cynicism here. If I could read this article when I started learning, it would’ve saved me a ton of time. That’s why I wrote it. I hope it’ll be useful to someone else but it’s fine if not. As an educator I’m proud of how much it crams in that’s usually spread over many weeks, and how the simple model almost perfectly generalizes. But yeah sure it’s making some unorthodox choices and leaves a couple of advanced cases within one indirection. I’m still very happy with it.