Item — HN Reader

Actually let me just try to explain my pedagogical approach and philosophy here. Maybe that makes it clearer.

I assume no prerequisites at first. So my reader has never seen a kana table and doesn’t know which syllables exist.

I choose to teach conjugation first. That’s an unorthodox choice but I like it! That’s what I set out to do. So we get far enough until it breaks down. And it breaks down when a rule (which worked so far) doesn’t help with “s” because saying “si” would sound wrong.

That’s the moment I use to teach kana table and its importance. This “you made a mistake” is a pedagogical vehicle for introducing kana rows. And we go over the exact ones that you’d make a mistake with. So each special case is walked through.

At this point we could discard Hepburn but I choose to keep going because if you know special cases, there’s no issue. And at some point you’ll learn kana anyway.

So that’s how I chose to layer it. Maybe it’s a bit unholy but I like it. It is definitely self-consistent.

1 comments

I understand why you wrote the article this way, I think the lesson here is “we have learned why Japanese textbooks do not teach the content in this order” and there are a couple reasons why this order is not good:

1. It relies on people not understanding certain things. In general, you cannot expect people to have exactly the right misunderstanding necessary for a lesson.

2. Spending extra time with Hepburn reinforces it, and it shouldn’t be reinforced.

I am in general extremely skeptical of lessons which try to engineer a way for the students to make mistakes. What I have seen in real classrooms and in informal teaching is that the mistakes are habit-forming and the outcomes of this kind of engineering are unpredictable.

Mistakes are appealing to the developers on HN because we understand things more by seeing them fail. But this does not mean that you can engineer somebody to experience the same moment of enlightenment that you did, because it requires constructing the same (incorrect) mental model that you had when you made that mistake that led to useful insight, and it both difficult and counterproductive to try and make that happen to students. Give people the best chances to learn by giving them the best chances to avoid mistakes, and the mistakes and insight will happen organically on their own, in unique ways for each student.

Okay I see where you’re coming from, sure. We assume different things about the reader and the context of the article. This is an article for people like me who like this approach — maybe engineers or people with an engineering mindset.

I also genuinely think it’s not that deep and that there’s no complex mistake being engineered here. I don’t believe you that the “mistake” of “sa with a replaced by i must be si” is an an unusual one for someone who hasn’t yet internalized kana. If we test this on random people on the street, I’m highly confident an overwhelming majority will make this exact mistake.

I agree with your broader point that “teaching via mistakes” is a risky path not worth it when the mistakes start getting combinatorial. I also think it’s absolutely fine when everyone does the same exact mistake, and there’s exactly one way to avoid it.

I also don't think this is especially deep—that I think this approach to teaching verb conjugation is a bad approach and I don’t think there is this much to say about it.

People off the street are obviously not learning Japanese verb conjugations in isolation. If they are learning it at all, they probably have some broader goals involving spoken or written fluency, and these people are gonna fire up DuoLingo or sign up for a class or something. Japanese verb conjugations are simple and easy to learn but they are usually not taught day 1, and you are not expected to learn the whole table at once, but one or two conjugations at a time along with practice using that conjugation.

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 think the call to “engineering mindset” may be illuminative, because engineers are likely to have unwarranted confidence in fields outside of their expertise. Engineers in practice often think that they can use engineering skills (broadly speaking) to solve education problems, learn foreign languages, or solve social problems. The phenomenon is sometimes called “engineer’s disease” or “engineer’s syndrome”. What I wonder is whether there is something about engineering mindset that is counterproductive outside of engineering fields—this seems plausible, because it explains why we don’t just teach everyone to use an engineering mindset.

>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 representative of anything. I said this is the explanation I wish I (me, personally!) were given, and I wrote it for people like me. I appreciate unorthodox explanations as a genre. As long as they're rigorously correct (again, you're welcome to point out factual mistakes), I like experiments like "learn a non-trivial part of the language with no prerequisites as a syntactic transformation in one evening". For many languages, including my native language, this is literally impossible! But for Japanese, it works. Maybe that sort of explanation is not to your taste, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve being written. The rest of your comment reads kinda ad hominem.

From what I can tell, my engineering-brained explanation is consistent with how a linguist would explain it (aside from choices in presentation like romaji). That's good enough for me.

> I never claimed it's representative of anything.

When I write “it’s not representative”, I am hoping to communicate an opinion and not hoping to refute a specific claim you made.

I appreciate unorthodox explanations, and I like to collect them—but sometimes the explanation just doesn’t “land” and in this case the explanation landed especially poorly for me, and I also identified some errors, like the claim that “si” is not in the kana, or that hanasimasu is incorrect—I know that you don’t accept my viewpoint that this is incorrect—sometimes it happens that explaining your point of view or reasoning in more detail doesn’t result in agreement.

What is certainly true about linguists is that they do not present explanations in ways that are consistent with each other—and sometimes not even self-consistent, but they are upfront about the tradeoffs (they present theories and acknowledge that the theories contain errors) and they decompose what they present into different topics like phonology and morphology.

I have read some linguistic texts on Japanese (not very well! It’s a difficult subject). What I saw is a lot of variation.

I think it’s fine that your explanation is good enough for you—that’s exactly what you expect when people make individual breakthroughs in understanding when learning a subject. Sometimes those breakthroughs do not translate well to other people or translate well to lessons and that is the main gist of what I am trying to articulate.

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.