Item — HN Reader

> 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 says!!! It’s the entire framing of the post. Please read it:

> i've tried to learn Japanese verb conjugation a few times before. at first, it looks simple (you just swap suffixes!), but there's a lot of nuance that can drag you down as a learner. i found a system i prefer but let me first explain why i struggled. […] i found this approach to teaching deeply frustrating and unsatisfying.

You’re projecting some kind of fantasy onto my post where it’s presumably claiming that it’s the best way to learn or that I’m a great teacher or whatever. Instead the post is literally sharing what worked for me, and what I wish was available.

1 comments

I did, I didn’t have a problem understanding your goals as I said in one of the comments in the beginning:

> 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)

(you focused on the fact that you also aimed to teach and we discussed that aspect a little bit), but a lot of people in the comments didn’t understand the goal of your post — why do you think it happened?

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 triggered the alarm bells. Then there’s the general distrust of crank-style “beginner discovers the universe and wants to teach everyone” which also has a flavor of “he doesn’t understand that the only true way to achieve fluency is talking to people” and so on. It hit all the common warning flags that set people off, and that emotional reaction is the backbone of the response. It’s not an unfamiliar dynamic, and it’s reminiscent of some programming subcommunities, although in programming this dogmatic “you must learn/teach things this way” norm was more common in 2000s, and has mostly subsided by the end of 2010s. Overall, I get the impression that for a lot of people the difficulty of learning the language, and in particularly the difficulty of teaching it to others, have led to this kind of conviction. Once you’re expressing this kind of righteous rejection, I think it can be tricky to see that it comes across as sneering and gatekeeping when seen from outside your community.

I see. Well, I already outlined why I thought the situation was happening — if you were trying to teach, I think you did it poorly and oscillated in your messaging from “this just works for me, personally” to “this my unorthodox method of teaching/explaining conjunctions in Japanese” (it’s clear even in comments here that you had to clarify multiple times your goals to different users).

Perhaps I am wrong but I personally don’t believe good teaching would get rejected by people (not organizations — this does happen) because of dogma. Being taught/explained something well is a very visceral experience, dogma can’t override it.

The other problem (people mistaking your personal experience for something else) could be improved by changes in your writing and messaging, and this is what I attempted to advise, I suppose. The writing will likely still be misinterpreted to a degree if what you’re saying about dogmatic thinking in the community is true, but, well, that’s the nature of communication — like with teaching, it involves working with particularities of other minds, simply being correct, methodical and rigorous in how you present arguments/topics can still result in failed communication.

Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable conversation. I apologize again if I came off negative or if my criticism was misplaced. Certainly wasn’t my intention. I genuinely enjoy many of the raised topics and was just interested in talking about them.

P.s. I would love read your failed experiences learning the language you mentioned in the blog and the comments here and what/how the traditional methods failed for you, if you ever decide to write about that, btw. I think it is a very beautiful moment when something one struggles with finally “clicks” —- I am fascinated by it and how it happens for different people.

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 writing. You can check some of my “proper” articles to see the pattern. Here I’m “teaching” basics of Lean: https://overreacted.io/the-math-is-haunted/. Here I’m “teaching” algebraic effects: https://overreacted.io/algebraic-effects-for-the-rest-of-us/. Here I'm “teaching” a particular React API: https://overreacted.io/a-complete-guide-to-useeffect/.

In all of those cases, my approach is to unroll my own mental model into the shortest topologically sorted path, and to share it with people in the form of a post. You could say that all of this is bullshit, maybe. From the past, I’ve gotten plenty of feedback that this approach has helped other people understand the things I’m explaining. So I have anecdotal evidence this is “teaching”, if you so insist on gatekeeping the term to the “proven” instances of someone else understanding it. My process here has been exactly the same. So yes, it’s both “sharing what works for me” and “my quirky take on it” and (I’m sorry) “how I teach this” because this is all the same thing to me. It’s not the same thing to you, and that’s fine, we just disagree on definitions.

I also don’t think it’s fair to say that “people” “rejected” my “teaching” here and therefore it’s bad. There's some positive comments here, I’ve seen positive comments on other platforms. Quoting a few of them: “I thought this was a great post, thank you for writing it :)”, “I'm not learning Japanese but I enjoyed reading this nonetheless”, “this is cool”, “Really good read that anyone interested should check out”, “This was VERY helpful, thank you! Hoping for more articles along the same lines of "engineer deconstructs a language and makes it more approachable", esp for Japanese.”. Do these responses satisfy your definition? Do I need to carry them around and present them to HN readers? This is extremely silly. The vast majority of the reaction here has been from people who already know the topic and have strong opinions about how it should be taught which is clearly not the audience for the article. If you want to run an experiment on a clean group of people, go ahead and tell me the results. I just wrote a post into the void. That’s what I do when I learn things.

I still find the way you talk “(people mistaking your personal experience for something else)” — presumably still banging on the “this is not good teaching” drum — very condescending. As I find most of this thread.

The conclusion I am drawing from this is that I simply do not belong in the English-speaking Japanese-learning community. I am clearly breaking some kind of unspoken norms around what is appropriate to consider “teaching”, who is allowed to “teach” without being sneered at, how modestly one needs to talk about own writing, and so on. I do not abide by these norms, and have very little desire to engage with this subculture. I will likely continue writing about my experience of learning Japanese, and will continue considering it “teaching” because I know it will reach some people like me. I don’t know if I’ll have the restraint to stay away from these discussions, but this is probably the most unpleasant cloud of online interaction I’ve had for months. I feel upset, not in the sense that I expected praise, but at the sheer tone of this discussion and at the attempts to put me in my place, so to speak. No thank you.