danabramov

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 …

>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. …

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…

>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 represent…

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 un…

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 respon…

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 …

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.

> 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 …

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 coa…

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 w…

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 …

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…

“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 s…

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. T…

“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 …

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’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 st…

The grandparent says it’s easier to teach by saying ichidan and godan actually mean “one-step” and “five-step”. That’s exactly what I’m teaching so it can’t be an argument against my article. This is …

I get that. I’ve compressed this as an aside in an article about something else. It’s a choice; like an article about React could spend a bit of time on arrow functions vs function declarations as a…

I’d normally be with you and I call this out as a concern purists would have my article. I’m doing something differently here and maybe more daring — the conceit of this article is that you can learn …

I’m just describing my experience learning. I understand that some compressed explanations match it, and I agree this one is good! This is not the explanation I was exposed to when trying to learn it …

I wanted to write a weird article! My whole shtick here is that learning conjugation is completely orthogonal to learning most of the language, and you can frontload it into a single evening like th…

I started learning a couple of months ago (with a couple of false starts before). What level am I supposed to be at by this point? This is so incredibly condescending I don’t even know what to say.

Please provide a counterexample if you think the article has a mistake or builds a system that doesn’t work.

How is this my headcanon when this is literally how it works linguistically? Please provide a counterexample.

> 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 ve…

I am literally saying in the article: > this is actually completely intentional. some purists may dislike that, but [..] i think it provides a much clearer intuition for Japanese verb conjugation …

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 :)

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…