danabramov

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 k…

Thanks! I’d say that a big part of the motivation for me was to show that this piece is orthogonal to the rest of the language. You can sit down and understand how to conjugate almost any word to almo…

I genuinely haven’t thought about zu/ji here (conceded!) It’s not relevant to conjugation though. In general, I find your attitude a bit condescending. This is what I wrote about my choice: >…

Author here — it’s a really fun, elegant, and beautiful language. I highly recommend it if you’re interested. Maybe controversial but I think you can largely ignore the Japanese-learning community if&…

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…

Ok yea I see what you’re getting at — my terminology was overly narrow. By “romaji” I specially meant “romanization I’ve chosen for this article”. I do offer an explicit note that other romanizations …

I see, maybe my use of “romaji” is sloppy because I implied “Hepburn romaji” specifically because that’s what I chose in the article. I do explicitly mention that other romanizations exist and that I …

> 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 yo…

I concede that using Nihon-shiki maybe would’ve been more elegant for what I tried to do in the article. > But the article doesn’t make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by …

It’s concatenation with the asterisk, and the asterisk is what we build throughout the article.

I’m saying that Hepburn is isomorphic to Nihon-shiki since each is an encoding of kana. Each of them is a bijection to kana (actually that’s wrong; see EDIT below), therefore there’s a bijection betwe…

We’re talking about the same thing but you insist that there is only one angle under which things aren’t confusing. I disagree. That’s fine. The two systems are isomorphic, and I genuinely believe tha…

Thanks! Feels like the only person on this page who gets what I was going for.

It’s a deliberate choice in the article. I cover every single caveat with it explicitly. I also mention this: > (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si&quo…

Okay, we’re fighting over definitions here. There is no “si” in Hepburn romanization. I am intentionally using Hepburn romanization in the article. Therefore, in my article “si” is a compile error. Yo…

I mean I think it’s both! As an author, I wrote this to settle my mental model. This doesn’t mean I could use it during fast speech, but I find it calming to understand the actual linguistic system be…

If you’re taught to shift rows, and you already comfortably think in kana — yes, I think that’s equally good. Some of the materials I’ve tried learning from when I got started with the language didn’t…

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 …

You glossed over my point. I’m not using it as a “crutch” for reading. I’m using it to have notation for the stem — the thing before -u. I could choose alternative notation with kana (e.g. just always…

Both of these things are described in the article. The first one is in “why romaji is actually bad” section, the second one is in “one more thing” part at the very end.

Maybe it’s not very clear but I don’t suggest studying from articles like this alone. Obviously you need to do sentence drills and talk to a tutor or native speakers to have any chance of success. I…

> And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet I don’t understand where this misunderstanding about my article comes from. I am saying that the sound a…

The article literally says: > there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. […] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. […]…

I feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article. As the article says below: > this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. i'…

> It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". All of this is described just below, in the s…

Why would you expect the article where I’m describing what worked for me to “discover something new”? I’m literally sharing the mental model that I personally found helpful. There’s nothing “new” in l…

I explicitly address my reason for choosing it over kana in the article. If you disagree, please engage with the argument that’s already there.

I’ve explicitly addressed this in the article. Cmd+F for a section called “why romaji is actually good” and then “why romaji is actually bad”. You may disagree with the approach, but I outlined my rea…

Author here. Strong disagree. I prefer having a system to simply memorizing. I don’t know what you mean by “so much effort”. I am literally just describing the system as it is brick by brick. If you s…

> What steps do I have to follow to get the majority of users to see my content? You can’t “get” the majority of the people to see anything, that’s not how anything works. Neither on centralized …