There are lots of people in the comments somehow offended by the author's genuine excitement over the method that worked well enough for them that they wanted to share it.
As someone who's never tried learning Japanese, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the deep dive and am now less afraid to check out some more serious tutorials (though I wish everyone put as much effort into explaining the system behind something so often dismissed as "just memorise it").
As someone who is fluent in Japanese, the thing is that this is not an example of a method that works well, it’s an example of a beginner coming up with an overwrought headcanon (while calling it “simple”, nonetheless!) that ultimately will hinder their understanding, as I will detail elsewhere.
If this was a similar post about programming, it would not get upvoted here because more people would recognise it for what it is: a “Monads are Like Burritos” post from a well-meaning but misguided beginner.
Linguistics are orthogonal to petagogy. Something can be sound linguistically but still an in optimal way to teach the same thing. If linguistics were all there was to language learning, we would all just get a grammar reference book and call it a day, but we all know that is a terrible way to learn a language.
Personally, as a beginner/early intermediate learner, what I have found works is just to allow my brain to learn this over time by reading and understanding more an more sentences. I used Genki and am aware that it thought this badly. But it was in the 3rd chapter and by the time I reached the 6th chapter I had gotten an intuitive idea anyway (とている just sounded wrong and I couldn't explain why). And I wasn't doing much output anyway so it didn't matter that I maybe confused a couple of verb endings as I recited the 2nd writing exercise og the 5th chapter of my textbook.
"Headcanon" implies I made it up and it's plain incorrect. Now we seem to be litigating that it's correct within its scope but the pedagogical approach is unsound?
I'm not saying that I wrote this article for everyone. I wrote it for me and people like me. Specifically, for people who appreciate the rigorous-and-ridiculous — like teaching from the linguistical perspective while using romaji.
It's the same approach that my "Just JavaScript" course uses — it's 100% by the spec, but I'm using unconventional metaphors (like "wires" for variables instead of "boxes"). I take pride in making rigorous explanations approachable by slicing the explanation differently.
This is not for everyone. But it's also not a reason to say this shouldn't be written.
I am not a native english speaker so perhaps I misunderstood what headcanon meant. But I took it to mean as expanded upon by GP, that you were a well meaning but misguided beginner and have some ideas about what works for language learners that is not expressed by language learners experts.
My personal headcanon to verb conjugation is that you know them when you know them, the shorter the explanation the better, spend more time with examples then explanations, and maybe just learn one or two forms at a time. And when in trouble, find a conjugation chart (preferably at the back of your textbook; after the glossary). My main criticism of Genki was that they should have taught the short form first (before the -masu form; 食べない and 飲んだ before 食べません and 飲みました etc.).
I can't remember which is which for more than five minutes!
I don't have a problem actually conjugating and don't have any tricks for it.
It comes with vocabulary. Once you have a vocabulary that contains enough verbs to hit all the cases, the rest just land in one of the cases by example.
If you know 泳ぐ (oyogu) very well, then even though you don't use 仰ぐ (aogu) very much, you just conjugate it intuitively like oyogu.
When you're speaking, there isn't enough time to go through a roster of rules.
I used to get these terms mixed up all the time because some textbooks use "Group 1" and "Group 2" to refer to these verbs, but Group 1 doesn't mean ichidan.
For all that I'm not totally sold on this article's idea of "stems" and "suffixes", I think it does a good job of avoiding this pitfall and correctly explaining the groups.
Ichidan verbs end in "ru", but many verbs that end in "ru" are godan. Once and for all, I just have to remember that ichidan end in "ru" and drop the entire "ru" and replace it with the conjugative suffix; and so the previous kana stays the same (one column). The godan ones fracture the last kana, changing it into the four siblings in the same row (or else replace it with って or った). If we have a -ru verb and the -ru goes to -ri to make the stem, that indicates godan (帰る→帰り→帰ります); if it just drops to make the stem, godan (見る→見→見ます）.
I have no need to tell which is which, other than discussing grammar with other gaijin. I would never remember that a verb is supposed to be godan, in order to then know how conjugate it; I already know how to conjugate it and so just for academics, I have to remember which pattern is classified as which conjugation.
An important aspect of vocabulary that informs you about verbs is knowing the nominal: the noun-like stem. Like when you consider 帰る, you know from your vocabulary that there is no noun-like word "kae" that is just written 帰. You know that "homecoming" is not "kae" but "kaeri", 帰り.
So from that alone you know instinctively which way it conjugates: らない、れない、りたい、った、って、ろう、。。。
And a big source of learning the stem is ... japanese polite speech with -masu.
This is how children absorb what the stems are: hearing all the verbs in -masu form.
For instance, I think that every single verb that ends in "-rimasu" in the polite form (other than just arimasu?) is a godan -ru word. Drop the masu and you have a -ri stem, which implies the word is -ru, and conjugates godan: -ranai, -renai, -ritai, -rō, -tta, -tte, ...
This kind of content is usually shared by people who are learning a language out of genuine interest for the first time. Most of the time it's Japanese because of the popularity manga and anime enjoy, and the challenge of learning a language that's so different from one's mother tongue. There are countless blog posts written by people to whom it "clicks" for the first time, and they excitedly run to their computer to share their novel experience. I don't see anything wrong with this, let them enjoy the moment. But if they stick to their learning routine, they will inevitably learn the truth that is that the only way to learn a language is to interact with it a lot through all possible channels - speaking, listening, reading, writing. Mnemonics may work for some time, but in the end one won't be able to actually use the language if they don't learn it intuitively. And there is also the fact that most of those people live in places where Japanese is not in everyday use, limiting their opportunities to practice it.
> Mnemonics may work for some time, but in the end one won't be able to actually use the language if they don't learn it intuitively.
A crutch can be cast away gradually.
Finnish has two verbs, ottaa "take" and ostaa "buy". As a n00b I confused them all the time. So I decided that the "s" in ostaa was a dollar sign, and I used that quickly in conversation to select the right verb. And as I got quicker at it, it became "intuitive". I threw down my crutch.
Yes, this is a valid point, mnemonics are totally valid when you are new to a concept.
I'm learning Turkish right now for example, and the dative forms for me/you (bana/sana) perfectly fit the accusative conjugation pattern in my native Polish. So my mnemonic is explicitly "the opposite of what you feel it is".
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 respond to thoughts in realtime. I didn’t mean anywhere in the article that a system like this is a replacement for these activities. I’m only saying that I find it helpful to understand how to connect a suffix to a stem from the first principles for when I forget that. I also find it illuminating to look at the linguistic system and how “nice” Japanese actually is (compared to my native language which is super messy). That’s why I wrote the article.
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 almost every suffix in the time it takes to read this. Yes — not fluently — and not “understanding” the language — but it’s wild to me that you can do that at all! It wasn’t obvious to me that this knowledge is orthogonal to everything else.
That’s what motivated me to write about it, really. In language courses all of this is often spread out over weeks or months. I thought it would be fun to write something that you can read in one evening and map out almost the entire system. With no prerequisites.
Senior management at a Japanese tech company, 2 kids, most of my daily life in Japanese here. Can confidently talk circles around most N1s.
I agree. I had plenty of strange abstractions and crutches when starting out learning Japanese, and starting in romaji was absolutely fine. While the post wouldn't benefit me now, starting out any useful mental shortcuts to producing Japanese would have been most welcome.
I think for a very specific audience the article is useful: an English speaker who is in the first month of learning Japanese and is having trouble understanding the basics of Japanese verb conjugation.
If you are not in that target audience, the article is not that useful. If are starting to learn Japanese, you would not start by reading this article. And once you are past your first month of learning Japanese, you have internalized how this basic part of Japanese verb conjugation works and thus the article seems hyper focused a tiny part of learning Japanese. So it’s predictable that people would point out the limited scope of the article.
I think “Aeron Buchanan's Japanese Verb Chart” offers a more complete overview of Japanese verb conjugation in a more concise form. It expects you to know how to read hiragana, which is reasonable because it’s one of the first things you learn when studying Japanese.
Intuitively I suspect that you severely underestimate how many people give up on the language somewhere in the middle of the process of learning this "basic part" in the traditional way. My aim was to show to this group that you can actually understand the entire mechanic in one evening with zero prerequisites.
> There are lots of people in the comments somehow offended by the author's genuine excitement over the method that worked well enough for them that they wanted to share it.
Did it work for them though? They apparently never got past the basics. So IMO it's more likely the opposite; they've distracted themselves from getting on with learning.
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.
Generally before you presume to teach (a term you've used repeatedly about this post) beginners you should be at least B2 level in the target language.
I wasn't aware that this community gatekeeps the word "teach" to exclude personal blog posts. I have no desire to participate in this community anymore, but you're welcome to mentally substitute it with some other word.
This is a quite weird article. It opens with several paragraphs about romaji, implying the target audience are not familiar with romaji/kana already. But it's way, way too early for such a reader to worry about verb conjugation.
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 this. I don’t respect the whole “it’s too early to do X” dogmas in learning and teaching, and I trust some of my readers will find useful what I find useful.
Because the whole article is built upon a straw man (it's not usually taught the way he claims) and the "method" is just a normal explanation (see this section on wikipedia).
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 the first time.
So you agree my explanation is correct (but unnecessarily longwinded and builds a strawman)? I’ll take that.
The straw man is how you claim it is usually taught. You claim that only 2 groups are taught when 3 get taught. You claim that you are given arbitrary tables to memorize, but it's usually explained to foreigners that you replace the last romaji to i when conjugating the verb into -masu form.
So in essence this article boils down to someone claiming that the usual explanation is confusing and then their own system turns out to be equivalent to the usual way it is explained.
And based off your comment here the reason behind doing this may be you extrapolating how you first learned it to how people usually learn it.
>You claim that only 2 groups are taught when 3 get taught.
I skipped the handful of exceptions because they have no rules associated with them, you just have to memorize them. Yes, it would be 3 if I counted exceptions. I am aware that they exist; you can check their list at the end of my post.
>You claim that you are given arbitrary tables to memorize, but it's usually explained to foreigners that you replace the last romaji to i when conjugating the verb into -masu form.
I must have been unlucky. I don't remember what resource I was using but it was primarily teaching with a separate table per suffix. Maybe the pattern was called out but I missed it due to feeling overwhelmed with the tables.
>And based off your comment here the reason behind doing this may be you extrapolating how you first learned it to how people usually learn it.
That's fair — if most people don't stumble here because this is clearly explained, that's good, and it means I've overstated the "usually taught". I still find that I prefer the specific style of explanation where we consider the corresponding vowel a part of the suffix, like -(i)masu or -(a)nai, which is how some linguists view it. That is another part of the motivation for writing the article.
I definitely remember only learning about two groups, personally. Is the third group, like, "irregular verbs", or do some books teach "the -suru verbs" as the third group (instead of "suru" being a single irregular verb that you can attach nouns to)?
I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as し on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi".
I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.
Yes, this is native speakers of Japanese applying a sound law pervasive in their native language (that the consonant /s/ cannot occur before the vowel /i/ and must turn into a sh sound), and applying it to English, which does not have that sound law and that happily allows /s/ to occur before our /i/-like vowels.
An equivalent phenomenon going the other way (at least for American English speakers) is clearly distinguishing また mata "again" and まだ mada "yet" - American English speakers tend to merge /t/ and /d/ in that kind of intervocalic position (think about pronouncing "latter" and "ladder" identically), and it takes deliberate effort to pronounce distinct /t/ and /d/ sounds there in Japanese, where the American English sound law that merges them does not apply.
I wasn't really going for kunreishiki, more ワープロ, aka "whatever is the least typing to make the desired characters appear".
I think typing in IME is how most people actually interact day-to-day with romaji, and I lex "si" and "shi" identically because the difference is usually not important.
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'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
Then the article includes an exercise that verifies the reader’s understanding.
I also included a note:
> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji, therefore it’s invalid.
"Factual mistake" is a bit harsh, but the missing piece is that there are multiple ways to romanise Japanese; all of them produce "valid Romaji" but only in the particular system being used. Si is how you write し in romaji using the kunrei-shiki romanisation. In the Hepburn romanisation it's shi. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#Diffe... .
Kunrei has been deprecated, Hepburn is the official one even the government of Japan recommends these days and matches better the pronunciation of the language.
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 chose not to use them — so I’m not worried about misleading someone who reads the article. But on pedantic level I see why “si doesn’t exist” sounds overly broad.
This is pedantic but you're thinking of "romanization", the act of transliterating Japanese with the Roman alphabet (romaji). There are different systems of romanization, most notably Hepburn and Kunrei. In Hepburn shi is correct, in Kunrei si is correct.
It sounds like you're saying "si" are not valid characters in the Roman alphabet.
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 exist, but outside of that note, I tried to stay within a single self-consistent system, so this nuance was lost.
> I feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article.
Nope. You correct yourself after, sure, but what I wrote is how it came across at the time when reading.
> Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji
No, that's not what "romaji" means. If you mean Hepburn, say Hepburn. And if you don't know the difference, that's a sign to learn more before presuming to teach others.
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 stay consistent within the article, and don’t want to overload the reader with terminology. My motivation here is that realistically that’s the romaji you’re going to be exposed to the most as a learner. At least that’s been my experience.
As for “correcting” myself, yes, I expect the reader invested in arguing online to also be able to follow more than a single paragraph of text. I think it’s fine that you stumbled there as that paragraph wasn’t for you. I don’t think I’ve hurt your understanding of Japanese this way.
The only people confused by that paragraph are people who already learned kana or correct pronunciation (or both). That paragraph isn’t for them.
> 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'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
I think it’s probably a mistake to use Hepburn if you’re learning Japanese, it kinda gets in the way. Either learn kana (which takes what, a week?) or use one of the other romanization systems which maps more cleanly to Japanese orthography
The Japanese phonological system doesn't allow a /s/ sound to occur before the vowel /i/, the consonant must undergo palatalization and become /ɕ/ (the IPA symbol for the Japanese sh-like sound). Because this is a regular sound rule, the native writing system doesn't have a way to distinguish the nonexistent */si/ sequence from the /ɕi/ sequence that actually occurs, and this is the syllable that hiragana し or katakana シ indicate.
In the Hepburn romanization system, which generally tries to be transparent to speakers of English or other European languages, し is romanized as _shi_, because this indicates to English speakers that the /s/ -> /ɕ/ sound change happens. In the Kunrei-siki romanization system, which tries to be more faithful to the distinctions made in the Japanese phonological system, し is romanized as _si_ to be consistent with the other possible syllables _sa_ _su_ _se_ _so_ that begin with the consonant /s/.
And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet is a sign that their command of Japanese isn't all that good yet.
> 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 at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”. My article uses romaji so this is self-consistent. I am also mentioning that there is an alternative system that would romanize it as “si” but that’s not the one I’m using in my article.
> I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”.
That is exactly the problem. Japanese doesn't distinguish between 'shi' and 'si', so all you're really gaining by pointing that out is learning how to correctly romanize Japanese, in a single system. Instead of learning the language you're learning how to represent the language in a foreign way.
The rule 0 of learning a language is to get rid of the crutches as soon as possible. Use their native writing system (or if they're one of the latin alphabet users, use their pronunciation rule), learn words of the target language using said language, and learn how to formulate concepts with the language rather than translating it from what you already know. Crutches should only be used to get to this point and no more. If you do that, details like 'si' and 'shi' are not even worth mentioning. Romanization methods have their own goals, and rarely is it about facilitating language learning.
> this is actually completely intentional. some purists may dislike that, but [..] i think it provides a much clearer intuition for Japanese verb conjugation than writing it in hiragana.
You are that purist that I’m talking about. I get your argument. I just think it’s a non-issue in my chosen pedagogical approach to convey what I wanted to move on. People unaware of how romanization works will nod at it and move on. People aware of it will not have issue with it. People with opinions about proper way to teach the language are the ones that will get stuck on this.
The article is engineer-brained. It’s for people like me. It’s not for the people you’re teaching, assuming these strong opinions come from you being a teacher.
It's unbelievable what lengths people will go to to hate on this. The article is good, I learned a bunch of stuff and was putting off verb conjugation for a while now.
Wow, there is a lot of negative gatekeeping on learning Japanese in this thread. I recommend people chill out.
Dan, this is cool, and I can tell you enjoyed writing this up and thinking it through as you wrote. Don’t let the haters get you down.
I think you’d like Orbit (withorbit.com), a tool that got built out of some experimental learning work I think originally done at quantum.country — it’s intended as a sort of toolkit to help turn blog content into spaced repitition inline memorization tools.
Check it out! I think the post would benefit from something like this - it’s fun for most to play with seeing how they are understanding this, and you spend a lot of time trying to create a bit of interactive reading/thinking in the blog.
I would not call this gatekeeping, I would call this a simple (albeit loud) critique, and maybe a reality check. Gatekeeping is when someone new is not allowed to enter a certain space, but people here are simply pointing out that this article is not the expert opinion of somebody that know how to teach Japanese verb conjugation, and that tutorials like these, while not harmful, are not super useful either.
Learning Japanese is fun, and I encourage the author, and the readers of this post to continue learning. But my advice to new learners is to just get a textbook (or some structured material; but please, just get a textbook unless you are one of the minority cases where you can’t for the life of you follow a textbook) and learn the conjugations little by little as they advance through their textbook (or their alternative structured material) one chapter at a time and consume more and more advanced Japanese language material over the course of dozens of months.
For the people who do that, I promise you, if you study for an hour or two a day, just following some structured material aimed towards beginners (preferably a textbook) and engage with the language as frequently, you will intuitively understand and be able to produce the mostly correct (i.e. with diminishing errors) by 3-6 months.
Look at all the text that has been spilled for just a simple thing that could be explained adequately by "col(す)+row(い)=し". There is really not much point studying grammar if you don't know grammar first, much like studying bigfoot. People have strange hobbies, but we also have a ethical obligation to prevent young people from deluding themselves (and not sell them bigfoot nets) when it comes to topics that require a lot of time and energy.
In language learning you can run into a whole host of category errors and waste your time, learning words, grammar, culture, JLPT, hepburn, lingusistics, prosodic theory, an app, kanji instead of the language. It's a trap that obsessive people often fall into when they should have been listening to tapes until they can differentiate the sounds, match them to words and chatting with locals. Which is unfortunate since after learning the language these obsessive types could ace the JLPT no problem.
> Wow, there is a lot of negative gatekeeping on learning Japanese in this thread. I recommend people chill out.
Any discussion of Japanese here brings out a lot of extremely defensive nerds. I don't know why this happens more with Japanese, but it sure seems to. I don't have a strong opinion on the post, and I tend to think that if you find something that works for you, when it comes to languages, you should go with it. Far be it from me to tell you that you're wrong for learning how you learn. But that said -- and as others have noted -- the explanation here is misleading, and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration. Japanese conjugation is extremely simple, and the author is missing some essential context that would make it all much clearer. For example:
> it's not entirely clear what nomu's stem is. is it nomu? but then, we define stem as the unchanging part — whereas the last vowel seems to alternate, like nomi or noma in some cases.
First, there is a clear stem (飲＊), but you just don't know that yet, because you haven't learned kanji [1]. The conjugation is extremely regular, and there's no reason to memorize a bunch of granular rules like this:
> む (mu) changes to み (mi) when adding ます（masu)
To wit: a godan verb [2] shifts from the "u" sound（う・く・す・つ・ぬ・む・る・ぶ・ぐ / u, ku, su, tsu, nu, mu, ru, bu, gu）to the "i" sound in the same column of the kana table（い・き・し・ち・に・み・り・び・ぎ） when conjugating to the formal (aka "teineigo" / aka "masu"）conjugation.
It's one rule. Then, for casual negative conjugations, you shift to the "a" sound in the same column (わ・か・さ・た・な・ま・ら・ば・が). Two rules. Formal past tense, and a bunch of other tenses derive trivially from these (e.g. わかるー＞わからないー＞わからなかった / "I understand", "I don't understand", "I didn't understand"）
That covers the conjugations the author cites in the piece, and a few others that he hasn't. However, for past tense or て form, the author's system will actually confuse you (IMO), because the you really do need to have an intuition for kana to know how the conjugations are going to play out. Namely the following rules:
る・う・つ becomes って or った (continual or past tense, respectively)
く becomes いて or いた
す becomes して or した
ぐ becomes いで or いだ
ぬ・む・ぶ becomes んで or んだ
For these, it's really, really, really helpful to just know kana, and how the sounds roll off the tongue. Because if you do, you quickly see that there's really no other way for the first three endings to work out, and require little/no memorization at all. The last rows are the exceptions that you have to learn. But again, it's what...7 rules in total? In the grand scheme of language learning, this is nothing -- and boy, let me tell you, if memorizing seven semi-arbitrary things is a burden for you, Japanese is not your language.
Anyway, the point is, I strongly encourage you to learn kana as quickly as possible, and then onto kanji forthwith. The sooner you do this, the sooner all will be made clear!
[1] I am using the royal "you" here. I don't know if the author knows kanji and don't care; I'm saying that if a regular person is at this stage of learning Japanese, they will not know many, if any, kanji.
[2] Just doing godan verbs here, because ichidan verbs are much simpler. The tricky part of ichidan verbs is knowing which ones they are, which, alas, you mainly just have to memorize. You can sorta-kinda infer that a verb with an "iru" or "eru" ending is ichidan -- it's always true that ichidan verbs end like that! -- but it's a necessary-not-sufficient condition, which, again, requires that you know the kanji to distinguish "without memorization."
Because Japanese learners have been burned more often by snake oil, because it's both harder for most people trying to learn it than other languages and there are more people.
Despite my previous comment I don't recommend learning the written language first at all. The script is entirely too simple a model of language to even be useful.
The first thing you are taught is that each character has one sounds, but that physically can't be true, there are millions of sounds and none of them sounds like an English speaking beginners' first guess. If Japanese was a formal system this might be desirable, but it's not. It's a physical means of communication and this "noise" is the error gradient that rewires your auditory cortex.
Misleading means it leads to a wrong conclusion somewhere. Please demonstrate which wrong conclusion my article is leading to.
>and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration
There is no "dependence" on transliteration per se. I use it as a visual shortcut for moving along the kana row, as I show in the middle of the post using the table. For all the examples we're looking at, the relationship between the mora and the corresponding romaji version is bijective — so there is literally no difference except the notation. I wanted the article to be accessible to someone who's not fluent in kana (and in fact to someone with zero knowledge of Japanese), hence the choice of notation.
>First, there is a clear stem (飲＊), but you just don't know that yet, because you haven't learned kanji
What could kanji possibly have to do with this? We're discussing a thing rooted in phonetics. The verb stem often includes kana in addition to kanji (e.g. 食べ). There's nothing special here about kanji at all.
>To wit: a godan verb [2] shifts from the "u" sound [...] to the "i" sound in the same column of the kana table [...] Then, for casual negative conjugations, you shift to the "a" sound in the same column
Sure, and that's exactly what I'm describing in the article. Why do you need to pretend I'm describing something different? There's even a place in the article where we use the kana table for that. However, since I assume the reader might not want to constantly look at the kana table, I focus on the phonetic intuition. And the phonetic intuition is trivially explained with romaji, which is why I use them.
Speaking of defensive…you’re on every comment thread here, arguing with anyone who disagrees with you, even a little. I didn’t say you were “wrong” — I said that your approach isn’t going to work well for most people as they learn, because it’s missing context. I gave you an example in my comment. Take my advice or not, but it’s true.
> What could kanji possibly have to do with this? We're discussing a thing rooted in phonetics.
Your system is using a limited model that explains some things, but doesn’t explain many others. You need the kanji to see the entire elephant.
Obviously linguistics are post hoc explanations of evolved phenomena and never precisely categorize everything, but there’s a more complete system here. It’s best to start learning it early, instead of relying on the crutch of romaji.
> The verb stem often includes kana in addition to kanji (e.g. 食べ). There's nothing special here about kanji at all.
The point was that there’s a clear stem. For godan verbs, the stem is nearly always the kanji. Sometimes, there are only kana (びびる), typically because the kanji is complex. A few times, there are auxiliary kana (e.g. 変わる). For a beginner, this is not important. You’re also mixing ichidan verbs (食べる) where this is the common case (kana from the i or e sounds), with godan verbs, where it is not. Understanding this fact, alone, almost eliminates the need to memorize which verbs are ichidan.
With relatively rare exceptions, the ichidan verb stem contains kana, and the godan verb does not. The major exception class to this for godan verbs is the ~まる intransitive verbs, where the ま/わ remains part of the stem (変わる、閉まる、泊まる、etc). Otherwise, it’s weird stuff like adjectives turned verbs or slang.
Just knowing this gives you a linguistic intuition for identifying and choosing intransitive verbs!
> However, since I assume the reader might not want to constantly look at the kana table,
They don’t need to. They just need to memorize the kana. People keep telling you this across this thread.
Learn the kana, and these conjugation rules become so trivial that you barely even need to “memorize”
anything.
> I focus on the phonetic intuition. And the phonetic intuition is trivially explained with romaji, which is why I use them.
Phonetic intuition is good. Doing it via romaji is fine for absolute beginners, but rapidly becomes a hindrance.
I feel like there’s some kind of miscommunication, and I can’t bridge it, which is driving me a little crazy. I genuinely don’t understand why it’s bad that I wrote something for people who don’t want to depend on fluently reading kana for learning conjugation rules. I genuinely do not see the connection between the two — I don’t think there’s anything “simpler” in seeing how む becomes んだ than in how m_ + ita collapses into nda. It’s literally the same thing. There is no added clarity by using kana. I understand you’re “supposed” to learn it first and so on, but it does not actually aid the process of learning the specific things covered in the post. You mention identification of stems from kanji but this is not the thing I am teaching in the post? It’s about the rewrite rules once you know the stem, not stem detection.
The main thing I don’t get though is… I never claimed my post will be useful to “most people”. Where did you take that claim? Why is everyone assigning that claim to me and then refuting it? I repeatedly said many times in the thread that I don’t expect this to be helpful to anyone except people like me — and everyone is arguing that no, you should do it the other way around. Where is this assumption coming from?
> I feel like there’s some kind of miscommunication, and I can’t bridge it, which is driving me a little crazy. I genuinely don’t understand why it’s bad that I wrote something for people who don’t want to depend on fluently reading kana for learning conjugation rules.
I didn't say it was bad. That's the miscommunication. You're taking it personally when people give you advice, and interpreting it as criticism.
(I mean, some people here are probably being obnoxious about it, but that's genuinely not my intent. I said at the very top of my first comment that if your method works for you, great! It's a completely normal part of learning to create explanations that fall apart with additional experience. For whatever it's worth, in the process of writing the previous comment, I looked up some things that refined my own understanding of the linguistics!)
> But that said -- and as others have noted -- the explanation here is misleading, and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration. Japanese conjugation is extremely simple, and the author is missing some essential context that would make it all much clearer. For example:
Doesn't going straight to kana actually kind of obscure the relationship between nomu and nomi that they both begin nom-?
As someone that recently went through an introductory Japanese course in Japan, I don't find this much different than how it's taught. Or maybe I'm missing something?
It seems like the article is trying to make the case that in romaji, you can split the letters and isolate the vowel (e.g. the asterix in the article's conjugation).
But we were simply taught to change from the う- row to the い- row (u- row to i- row). I switched to Japanese to illustrate that you can make that statement even without romaji. In that case, it seems like basically the same thing?
As an anecdotal point, my class was mostly non-english speakers and I didn't find the above to be a sticking point for my classmates. The real sticking points were messing up the ichidan verb exceptions (ichidan verbs that look like godan) and conjugating the correct form for the different grammar points. Te and ta form were also a bit tricky. But the article doesn't seem to offer anything new to help there.
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 do that, and instead described each case as special. That’s what I didn’t like.
That said, part of the challenge to myself with this article was to allow someone to learn Japanese conjugation even if they have zero knowledge of the language (even no kana). So that’s another constraint influencing my choice. I also wanted to have the visual “gluing” throughout the article as an aid for intuition, so that’s another reason I used romaji.
I've found that any resource relying on any romaji after the first chapter or two is often a complete waste of time.
It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.
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 reasons for choosing it (as well as its downsides).
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 using the -u ending, or the idea of variable stems like i-stem and a-stem) but then the visual “gluing” wouldn’t work. Which is the whole point of mental model I’m communicating. It’s fine if you don’t find this mental model helpful but it’s the point of the article.
I’ll be honest that I also wanted (as a challenge) to write this article so that a person with zero Japanese knowledge would be able to correctly conjugate almost every word to every ending. This is more of a teaching drill for myself though but it’s another reason for the romaji choice.
The explanation made sense to me: romaji works well for vowel shifts (as the vowels aren't glued to consonants) while kana works well for consonant shifts (because the vowels are glued to consonants).
Latin text's smaller tokens/phonemes have advantages and disadvantages, but they are a convenient notation for getting the author's point across.
The difference in phonemes reminds me of how game designer Naramura came up with the (Spanish-sounding) name "La Mulana" for his game by spelling his name backwards in kana. In romaji it would have been "Arumaran" which is completely different (while in kanji it would have been "Muranara".)
Not quite. If you change the order of some kanji, the general case is that the resulting text has no definite pronunciation. You definitely would not expect that the sounds assigned to the kanji in one ordering would be the same ones assigned in a new ordering.
This is a phenomenon the Japanese sometimes play with. In the novel Musashi, Musashi comes up with that name by reinterpreting the characters of his actual name (which, in the novel, is Takezō).
Agree. Especially how easy it is honestly to learn hiragana. You can practically learn it in a day and keep a table next to you to look up every time you forget one.
If you're at the point you're learning verbs you'd be mad not to know how to read some kana.
The benefit you give (be able to "cut" a kana in the middle) is really weak, I've never seen anyone being confused by that when learning in kana.
This is completely nullified by all the drawbacks of using romaji while learning and they're well known already.
The only reason to use romaji for Japanese grammar is to explain the concepts to someone who has no interest in learning the language, just for their general knowledge.
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 the visual notation to work and I don’t consider that motivation weak. Maybe this helps frame it.
This is true, the only practical place where romaji might be used daily is for IME input.
This is why I think all the commenters obsessing over romaji just add fuel to the fire by being elitist over something that should only matter to an absolute beginner.
It's especially vain if the primary reason to choose one romanization strategy over another is to save keystrokes on a keyboard.
The comments to this article are another example of something I see so often in Japanese language learning dicussions I see online. It's always filled with debate, disagreement, arguements over incredible subtle things, and everyone trying to optimize the best method. It can be really discouraging space for early learners.
Theorycrafting efficient ways of learning Japanese while being barely conversational yourself is a completely different hobby from actually learning Japanese (or actually studying the teaching of Japanese), and sadly in online spaces the former often swamps out discussion of the latter.
The online spaces can be really discouraging, true—but it can also be really discouraging to be in a classroom or in a foreign country, struggling to use a language you barely know. Meanwhile, there are also a lot of ways to spend effort trying to learn a language without gaining mastery. Truly frustrating.
If you want some decent level of fluency then there is something you have to do, which is to communicate with other people in context and with specific goals in mind (get information, give information, make a request, etc). Whatever you can do to arrange for that to happen is probably more valuable than anything you can do online or with books. I personally like to recommend finding classes at a local college.
If you can’t get that, then I think the next best thing is reading and listening.
Drills are also necessary but you can easily fill your time with drills without advancing your ability to communicate or understand people.
There is plenty of research about what is / is not effective when it comes to learning languages so I encourage people to at least take a look at the results of that research rather than just go with whatever people recommend online (I’m just some random person online, I may be no better than the next). AI tools reportedly have a positive effect but they are not nearly as good as human interaction.
Japanese language learning environments really are ridiculously hostile and I've stopped engaging with them unless im searching for a specific resource.
I've dabbled a bit in Mandarin and while eventually i ended up liking Japanese more as a language, the Mandarin language learner community felt like such a warm bath in comparison. The people were friendly and welcoming and willing to help and genuinely excited to find more people wanting to learn the language.
It's not discouraging at all. Japanese concepts do not have a 1-1 mapping with English concepts, so there is a lot of debate about how it can be taught. I find it fascinating.
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/when the vibe isn’t right.
Mostly it helps to find learning resources that gel with your style of learning, and if possible, a tutor so you have a roadmap and more motivation. I found mine on italki. I also find Claude very helpful for sentence drills based on words and grammar I know.
It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
Mu, bu and nu also all obey the -nda transformation due to phonetics, and not due to how "if we just shuffle the letters around and presto! Nomu becomes nonda".
Japanese already has plenty of its own reading inconsistencies, so adding another layer on top isn't going to help you.
Finally, there's going to be so much kana in your every day life that learning conjugation in romaji is guaranteed to cripple your reading, because instead of recognizing kana (e.g. you see a billboard that says お茶を飲んだ方がいい！ as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go) you've spent the first n hours on trying to "hack" the language instead of just learning it.
> 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 section called “why romaji is actually bad”, with these specific examples being tested.
> It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
This is also described further below in the post.
> as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go
I see “understanding the system” and “applying it fluently” as two separate activities. I find romaji more illustrative for the former because the system is phonetical on a sub-mora level. Whereas kana is more helpful for the latter. I don’t assume my reader is an idiot, and so I assume that they would be able to pick the right tool for the job on their learning journey. The fluency always layers on separately anyway, understanding doesn’t “help” there. It’s just that personally I find understanding a great motivator (and fallback) for developing fluency.
-u godan verbs historically ended in ふ /fu/ (and earlier /pu/), and were written that way until the 20th century kana reform. So the historical conjugation pattern of a verb like tamau was tamafa-/tamafi-/tamafu-/tamafe- + additional inflectional endings. The /f/ became a /w/ before /a/ but weakened and was lost entirely in other positions, leading to the modern pattern of tamau, tamaimasu, etc. but tamawanai.
And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english. Complaining that there's no english equivalent of the russian (взгляд / vzglyad)'s initial cluster would be similar in feel - no english words use it, so the romanization can be whatever you like, really.
> And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english.
Erm, wtf? The English "si" sound does exist and sounds different from し. There is a reason people don't want to write Sinzyuku, and while I think they're making the wrong tradeoff, it is a tradeoff and should be acknowledged as such.
"As a result, the sequences [ti si di (d)zi] do not occur in native or Sino-Japanese vocabulary."[1] Unless I'm missing something, Japanese phonology doesn't include the sound english has as "si", only "shi"? I'm not a native speaker though, it's entirely possible that I am missing something.
Technically, it's possible to write the "si" sound as スィ, similarly to much more common constructions like ファ and ティ.
Wiktionary lists eight whole words that use it! (The entry for スィ itself, a couple obscure loanwords and proper names, and a couple alternate spellings of words that Japanese people normally pronounce using the "shi" sound.) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_terms_spell...
Scroll down to Gelernte Sprachen (=Languages being learned).
The data of the Swiss Federal Bureau of Statistics confirms that among languages currently being learned among the residents of Switzerland Japanese comes at 7th rank!
It is actively being studied by every 40th person above 25!
Everyone is a weeaboo!
The ranks are: 1 English (lingua franca of the world) 2 German (administrative language of most of Switzerland) 3 French (administrative language of 1/4 of Switzerland) 4 Italian (big minority language) 5 Spanish (first language with no direct connection to Switzerland) 6 Swiss German (oral language of most of Switzerland) 7 Japanese (everyone is a weeaboo) 8 Portuguese (another language with no direct connection to Switzerland)
Don’t want to sound negative, just want to share my observations as someone who’s been actively learning Japanese for a couple of years. 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 verbs. It's not hard; it makes sense, just some textbooks (e.g. Genki) teach it really bad.
Learning Japanese is about learning a new way of thinking and structuring your thoughts. The more you learn, the more you realize it just doesn't fit into the English world. You can't really translate Japanese into English without losing nuance — and sometimes that nuance is important. So start early and start training your brain to think in the language, instead of trying to translate it and force it into English or some other language brackets. It won’t work; it won’t make sense; you will get stressed and confused.
> 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 verbs
This is literally what I teach in the article, including these translations. Quoting it:
> in ichidan ("one-row") verbs like taberu, the last syllable of the stem is fixed. it's always going to be be, no matter the suffix:
>
> (table)
>
> it stays on a single row in the hiragana table, hence "one-row".
>
>on the other hand, in godan ("five-row") verbs like nomu, the final syllable of the stem alternates between ma, mi, mu, me, and mo:
> (table)
> it spans all the five rows, which is why it's godan ("five-row"). the m* "wildcard" represents the entire ma/mi/mu/me/mo column.
You’re also mischaracterising my approach. I am not teaching to “think in English”. Quoting from the article:
> i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table. so this is a reminder to not think in romaji when you do calculations. when we conjugate godan verbs, we literally go up and down the column. (maybe all these textbooks that used hiragana had a point!)
If you have objections, please engage with the article’s actual content, not with what you assume it is based on a glance (“oh he’s using romaji, this is thinking in English”). I’m using romaji for specific reasons that are motivated and explained in text, and I show every single pitfall of that choice as well.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to make sense of something new using terms and concepts you already know and that click for you. We all do it, me included.
I was speaking more broadly about learning Japanese and what I see on HN. Every six months or so, somebody discovers a clever pattern in the Japanese language. It’s almost always related to something taught in the beginning, the N5 level. And that pattern seems to have been eluding rest of us.
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 fell off and lost the interest the first time I tried to learn the language.
So this whole thing is about romaji… Judging from your article and the comments you've been writing, you have strong feelings about it. Okay, you don't need kana to understand verb conjugation…
But what you've already encountered is that everyone keeps insisting you should learn kana as soon as possible and avoid using romaji. I'm not gonna write an essay on why that is, but if you're serious about learning Japanese, you're gonna have to learn kana, and it's one of those things you should really get out of the way early.
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 understanding verb conjugation. There is no hard dependency between them at all. I particularly like that it unlocks the visualization of swapping in the vowel which kana obscures. And I like that the article is understandable to a reader with zero knowledge. That motivates the choice.
I get that: getting stuck on something, losing all interest, and just stopping altogether for a month or two. Happens to me from time to time.
Genki, for example, did a pretty awful job of explaining verbs. I bet a lot of people gave up right at that lesson. I myself have re-learned the verbs at least three times now. The first time, I learned all of them in the ます (masu) form. To conjugate, you just drop that and add another ending like ました (mashita) for past tense. That was a really bad approach :D But hey, it got me to learn 15 or so commonly used verbs.
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 something I not only say, but explicitly show visually with a table — as I have just quoted. From this I conclude the grandparent hasn’t read the article, and is commenting on vibes.
Then the grandparent says something I agree with (don’t force the language into another language) but I don’t think it’s a fair description of what I’m doing. It sure looks like that’s what I’m doing, but I strongly believe that learning conjugation is primarily phonetical (it’s about how it sounds, not kana itself) and therefore romaji is just a better pedagogical choice for someone not already fluent with kana. And no, I don’t buy that you have to put being fluent in kana as a prerequisite. The whole conceit of the article is basically that you can learn almost the entire conjugation system in one evening with zero prior knowledge of the language. That alone justifies the small shortcut I took to get there.
I figured it was alluding to more conventional approaches to learning them. Reads like you’re making assumptions and defending instead of engaging with criticism in good faith.
“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 the article’s approach. Thus, the assumption. Where am I wrong or uncharitable?
> Learning Japanese is about learning a new way of thinking and structuring your thoughts.
I suspect this is true with most languages that are not in the same language family. The indoeuropean languages are all pretty similarly structured (don't @ me for not knowing the eighteenth tense of lithuanian), but it still takes time and effort for an english speaker to think in french, even if for the most part concepts translate directly. But bantu languages, eg kirundi or zulu, lean heavily on verbs with an entirely different conception of sentence structure and morphology, where you can stick entire clauses into one word, and you realize that your brain is picking up on patterns to decipher grammar that wouldn't make much sense in indoeuropean languages like dahl's law (except apparently in greek and sanskrit, where it's called grassman's law? Huh... now I know). Hausa is different still where you need to think about tense in an entirely different way—the pronoun is conjugated and the verb remains unchanged, and sometimes it feels like there are more irregular words than regular. Mandarin is beautiful, and actually quite simple to speak a little conversationally, if probably as difficult as english (or maybe more so) to master.
Learning foreign languages really makes you realize how central language is to basic cognition. You see the world in a different way, with different values and relations, depending on which language you speak/think in.
Ironically, I think this makes people extra susceptible to thinking that chatbots are intelligent (or even conscious, mr dawkins), even though it fails basic tests of memory and learning necessary to convincingly mimic understanding of, idk, time passing. Or motivation. Or emotion. But you can tell when it's awkwardly translating from another language in a way that a human would likely catch quite quickly if exposed to billions of documents.
As an unrelated tangent, I love seeing it when the “thinking” in a native language leaks into the writing in another, I find it so endearing and intriguing. My French colleagues sometimes produce the weirdest English sentences (perfectly understandable just unusually phrased), that alone occasionally sparks my interest on picking up a bit of French — I just want to learn how different the grammar and sentence construction is!
Obviously, it applies to other languages, I’ve just been working a lot with French. Well, and my own language often leaks into English, of course.
Don't know of any books that get it right. I don't think you can get it right the first time, it would be way too complex and technical. Most people would give up on the first lesson. Maybe better to treat it as an iterative process, which is how it's taught actually. First you learn it in some idealized, oversimplified concepts, then you go over them more deeply and pick up more nuance each time.
I’d recommend r/LearnJapanese for finding material and ways to study.
IIRC linguists (like, actual academic researchers) prefer to “break up” kana and analyze the consonant and vowel separately when dealing with conjugations. Treating kana as indivisible units is AFAIK only really a thing in Japanese linguistics historically done in Japan. All this to say, I’m pretty sure this “just change the vowel” approach is perfectly fine from a theoretical perspective (and as a fellow learner, also very aesthetically satisfying :-) )
One big change I had when learning Japanese was that someone introduced to me Cure Dolly videos on YouTube, and it has been an eye-opener: All these verb conjugations are actually attaching another verb to extend its meaning
I started to learn Japanese 30 years ago, and in my experience the people who try to be smart and build systems almost never get decent. It’s procrastination while thinking they’re actually productive.
To add insult to injury this article hasn’t discovered anything new, makes it sound way more complicated than it is, and in the end still requires you to just remember which verbs are of the eru/iru group, and which are not (which was posed as a problem to solve in the intro).
Just make cards and mark the stem, learn it along with the verb. No need for heuristics. If you ever forget, you’re bound to remember the masu-form and can reverse engineer the stem from that 100%.
Similarly, when complaining about how you have to memorize a big table of verb conjugations in the intro, the author links to a table of... -ta forms, a verb form for which the author later concludes you just have to memorize a big table.
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.
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.
"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.
Agree. Experience shows that fluency arises when you don't have to think about rules anymore. My advice is to not spend too much time learning grammar rules (actually, no time, like native learners). Leave the rule discovery to your unconscious brain and get going with rote repetition.
Your brains "language module" is not a slow computer, computing rules, it's a fast lookup-table.
A little explanation goes a long way though, Keyword here being little.
When starting out it is super nice to know stuff like: here is how you say if-then statements, here is how you recommend stuff, here is how make guesses, here is how you quote another person, etc. etc.
That said, I would argue most textbooks get the ratio of the length of the explanation vs. example sentences wrong. For every sentence in the explanation you should have at least three examples.
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 wanted to share by writing.
And wow.. you did seem to go out of your way to stay ahead of those comments. Respect for that.
And my respect for dissecting this aspect of Japanese grammar. You seemed to be dissatisfied spending time learning something that, in your eyes, wasn't yet condensed to its most basic rule. And I agree with that feeling. It leads to truely understanding how something became, eventually to discovery. Your article reads like you did that research mostly for yourself, but wanted to share what you found. That's a refreshing attitude, although the chances are high that field has been tilled thoroughly by Japanese linguists. I have to say I can't remember having seen any explanation about secret vowels/consonants in Japanese grammar books - I know some. But that may be because 1. I haven't read every there is, 2a. it's sort of doing archaeology on language and/or 2b. it doesn't add much to simplify learning the rules.
I confess my affair with grammar was always a cursory one and that may be because it proved to be so much more effective to go with examples, and pick that conjugation up as a side dish. But that's just me.
Compressing the rules does make sense, but at some point you just have to learn what's there. Language and grammar is always more or less arbitrary. Elegant yes, but arbitrary. It can't be derived from fundamentals. But the payoff makes it a worthwhile endeavor learning a language so strange from English as Japanese: you get a glimpse what the essence of language is. What a great motivation that was and is.
Some things that might spark your interest and keep exploring:
There are ごだん verbs that look like いちだん:
要る, 帰る, 限る, 切る, 知る, 入る, 走る, 滑る
Verbs with the same dictionary form but belonging to different conjugations:
切る/着る, 帰る/変える, 要る/居る, 減る/経る, 湿る/閉める, 練る/寝る
Keep up the good work. Doing research with the door open is a noble endeavor in its own right.
Frankly, this thread was kind of wild, and it really got to me. It's not my first rodeo on HN, but the amount of wilful misunderstanding, weaponized debate devices, and manipulative grandstanding was off the charts compared to anything I've ever received in response to articles about programming. I'm still not sure what to attribute this to, and it will likely torture me for some more time.
I mention this at the end of the article, but the paper that inspired me is "No consonant-final stems in Japanese verb morphology" (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2010.03.026). It uses a different notation but it also considers the suffixes to be -(i)masu, -(a)nai, and so on, and specifies rules for how empty-ish slots concatenate. Maybe you'll be able to understand it better than I did! I found it very interesting but dense.
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 learning or teaching a language. But this is the most minimal model I’ve found useful, compared to others, and I wanted to share it with other people.
I think you’re taking a lot of stuff for granted. “Just” do cards etc. You’re using the word “stem” but what’s a stem? Why do we sometimes inject -i or -a (or -wa) there and sometimes we don’t? You still have to learn that and understand that. That’s what I’m describing in the article. If you already know stems and how they compose with suffixes, congratulations, you won’t find my article useful.
Honestly, you don't need to "learn" or "understand" much grammar explicitly. I think it definitely helps get you off your feet, as you can "decode" sentences if you remember grammar rules, but eventually the grammar has to be internalized anyway. This happens when you are repeatedly exposed to the same patterns in context. I don't know how English or Norwegian grammar works, and I'm fluent in those. I skipped grammar in Japanese and focused on reading, yet I can understand most things and I can tell when something sounds wrong.
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 coalesce in my mind into an intuition later, I appreciate seeing the shape of these patterns. Especially when they’re so elegant. Why is sharing that a problem?
I didn't criticize either your article or your comment :). I enjoyed reading the article and finally learning why it's called godan and ichidan, and it was fun to learn that kau was originally kawu.
Any mention of Japanese learning always brings out negativity and criticism (and the effect is probably doubled by being on HackerNews) so I understand that you're on defense.
My comment was really just an objection to "You still have to learn that and understand that", as I don't think studying grammar is a mandatory step in learning a language (I'm a subscriber to the Input Hypothesis by Stephen Krashen). Though it could very well be that grammar study is an effective shortcut to internalizing grammar. At the end of the day, the amount of hours spent learning from context matters way more than the specific steps taken along the way.
Ah, I see what you mean. For me personally, knowing the shape of the system underneath has a sort of calming effect because I have a sense of the upper bound of how annoying it will be to learn by osmosis. And it's also nice to have a fallback for when I have a cache miss and need to really think through saying something.
First, we learnt verbs in the -masu form. Nomimasu, tabemasu and so on.
Then we learnt this song (to the tune of Clementine)
chi ri i tte
mi ni bi nde
kiite
giite
It's a quick mneumonic to help you go from the polite verb to the "te-form" ending. I hummed it in my head while working out the conjugation before it became natural and "obvious".
A plug for my favourite book here. Richard Webb's 80/20 Japanese covers these topics extremely well, and in a very logical / productive order for a foreign speaker.
(and it comes with very enjoyable audio tapes and anki cards to boot)
Romaji are great, and in some ways more instructive because they reveal patterns which are otherwise a little hidden. You just have to realize that S+I is shi, T+U is tsu, etc. I don’t want to get too deep into it but there is a regularity to the language, and rules, and different choices of writing system reveals different pieces of the puzzle.
Next, the conjugation itself. There are massive categories of conjugations missing! Like, how do you get from taberu / nomu in this system to tabereru / nomereru? It turns out that these ichidan and godan verbs actually do have some differences in conjugation. Who’d have thought? (There is the -i stem, but there are other forms.)
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.
Agree with others that grouping verbs into -ru and -u verbs is a weird choice that only kicks the can down the road. I get why a textbook like Genki does this, i.e., not wanting to throw terms like 「一段」and 「五段」at people literally a few chapters into their Japanese language learning journey, but it just muddies the waters.
Like so much pedagogy, this feels like a good example of "hey, here's a quick-and-dirty heuristic for how this thing works, but just keep in mind that we'll explain how it really works later on". Except Genki I+II never mentions the terms 「一段」or「五段」at all. (it's similarly criminal that they never introduce pitch accent either, but that's another story).
My advice to anyone getting started with Japanese would be to get out of the introductory textbook stage as quickly as possible. Supplement with grammar explanations from other resources early on. Cure Dolly, Imabi.net, Tofugu, YouTubers, LLMs--whatever clicks with you.
I'm just glad that early in my learning journey, I heard a YouTuber describe Japanese as "agglutinative" (with a comparison to German)--a term I'd never encountered before. A light bulb went off for me and things started to click.
In any event, glad to see this kind of article kick off discussion/debate :D. 皆さんは、頑張りましょう！
Really cool writeup. I personally like the Cure Dolly approach to conjugation, in which she said there was no such thing as conjugation (at least not in the Indo-European sense), only helper verbs and adjectives. Japanese grammar is just so difficult to understand as a native English speaker. Thanks for sharing.
Japanese is known as an agglutinative language [0], and how verbs are conjugated also has a lot to do with politeness, as well as local dialects. That's why you can turn on an anime and hardly understand it, even after a couple years of study.
I got to the third year college level in my own Japanese studies, and at that point, memorizing kanji was starting to compete with my computer science studies, so I had to drop it. I got to travel to Japan and live with host families (we kind of settled on a Japanese/English pidgin), so I don't regret the experience.
Looks good. It essentially separates phonotactics out of conjugation patterns instead of conflating them, which works also very well with how I learn languages. How to conjugate then breaks down to finding the stem (yes, some learning is always involved), and then there are not even different conjugations, but there are simply vocalic and consonantal stems -- all the morphology is in the suffix (the 'secret vowel') and the rest is phonotactics. I am sure there are irregular verbs, but probably this explains 90% or more of the verbs with simple rules. For me, this creates a perfectly logical system. Thanks for the overview!
As someone who is learning Japanese and is struggling through learning conjugations.... this is not explained simply to me.
Maybe it's because I'm at a different part of my learning journey, but this seems to go on and on and on about godan v ichidan verbs but 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), and te-form gets a very very short mention at the end x_x
Also, the romaji did my head in but I understand that was done for a reason (I don't agree with the reason, but at least there was one)
> 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 article is that it doesn’t teach any meanings, it just teaches “how to append a suffix to a stem”. If this much is obvious to you, that’s fine, the article isn’t useful to you. It was difficult for me to understand ichidan/godan.
The article does not attempt to explain how to pick the suffix or what those suffixes mean.
Fun, and a programmatic perspective. However, it can be too easy and fun to get super caught up in these details, if your goals are some level of fluency and ability to communicate/read. The majority of people that I know who have gained any level of fluency in Japanese as an adult mostly avoided stuff like this because (for many people; of course everybody is different) doing all of this mental math to dive down to the last detail was nowhere near as effective as some speaking and reading drills.
By all means, it is fun to play with a language. And every person's brain works differently.
I like to use this metaphor, though. You're hiking a mountain, this journey to the "peak" is reaching some goal of fluency.
It's fun to stop and look at rocks, examining, comparing and whatnot. But it doesn't necessarily get you closer to the peak. I mean, it might, because you'll better understand your footing every-so-slightly. Not a perfect metaphor.
I'm a bit dismayed by all the negativity you're getting. Thanks for all your level-headed and detailed responses here.
I have a hard time understanding why people object to this kind of attempt to systematize something that conventionally relies on rote learning. I've always found that figuring out the underlying rules helps with the rote learning. When you see some new word or conjugation, it's super helpful to have a method for explaining why it's that way; it helps fix it in your mind.
I wonder if native speakers object to this approach because it isn't really how you learn as a kid. You don't learn any abstract rules, you just absorb a huge amount of training material and construct your own model. But that doesn't mean adults need to learn in the same way; we can and should leverage our painfully-acquired knowledge and skills from other domains.
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 still find documenting my mental model helpful because most articles I’ve seen before were not teaching it clearly enough for my taste.
Funny how some conjugated forms of verbs collide with dictionary forms of other verbs (esp. if we ignore pitch accent differences):
E.g. potential of 買う (kau, to buy) is 買える (kaeru), which is spelled like 帰る (kaeru, to return home).
It reminds of you how "lay" is a verb (to put something into a flat resting position, but is also the past tense of "to lie" (take on a supine position).
Today, I lay bricks; yesterday I lay in bed all day.
Plus lie and lie are examples of how English verbs can be homonyms in dictionary form, but conjugate differently, something we see in Japanese (either actual homonyms or near homonyms modulo pitch accent).
While we are on the subject of Japanese and since everyone criticises the author, any resource recommendations or otherwise good practices to share with a fellow Japanese learner?
If you want to procrastinate actually learning (the HN way): scraping and parsing a couple of dictionaries, stroke samples, and sentence translation repos, setting them up in a local sqlite db and have fun exploring connections in the language with SQL queries. Guaranteed to keep you away from actually learning the language for at least 2 months.
In seriousness, I do recommend textbooks above anything else. Structure is your no. 1 friend as you go through the language. Go to r/LearnJapanese to find the right textbook for you. Use apps only complement your learning, SRS is amazing for memorization and Anki is pretty good to optimize your vocab. Same goes for my app Shodoku. Only use it to complement your learning, if you want to learn how to write, write primarily in your notebook and only go through the app to optimize your memory.
I wonder what the author’s native language is as they seem to struggle with the concept of alternation.
For me, the first half of the article could be removed and the learning could simply start with “there are two types of verbs in Japanese (+ some irregular verbs), one type conjugates without alternation in the root, the other with”. That’s enough to get the mental model but my native languages have alternation to begin with so it’s an intuitive concept.
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 that doesn’t need to be the case. But yes, I am basically describing alternation.
You don’t explain conjunction in such details as as well and it is not universally present feature in all the languages though.
Writing about learning languages is tricky because you cannot write for a universal audience, you have to write for speakers of a particular language (I suppose English in this case, since the article is in English), you’re also lucky if you know whether they have ever learned any other foreign language, and what particular education system they’re coming from (some education systems teach basics of linguistics and its terminology, some don’t — a language teacher might find themselves having a class full of people who have never learned what a clause, subject, object, or conjunction are, who don’t have the mental model to operate with these categories).
I don’t speak any Japanese and your explanation was understandable to me (even if there were some redundancies) but I think the negative reaction in the comments is just because of mismatch of your mental model of a language and people’s mental models.
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), but I think it’s not very clear from the article as some in the comments seemed to expect to learn from it, rather than learn about how you solved a particular obstacle in your learning.
I hope I am not coming off as bashing you or your writing. I now regret writing my original comment now that I read all the other replies — it looks like I am your work calling the article redundant, I am sorry for that. I hope you continue writing about your learning path — language learning is fascinating, and the more information we share about how we learn, the easier it is for everyone. And Japanese is a very beautiful language! Kudos to you for tackling it.
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 this particular serialization of concepts can only serve as "me documenting my journey" and not "me teaching someone". Like, it's a bit presumptious to say that no one will actually learn from it. Maybe 45% find it incomprehensible, 40% find it overly verbose and obvious, and 5% find it the best thing ever that unlocks the understanding for them. That's kind of what I expect, honestly, and that's good enough for me. I'm genuinely proud of the pedagogical approach in this article. It's a bit "experimental", which is why I didn't put it on my main blog, but this is exactly how I'd want to be taught in the beginning. I assume others like me exist.
Someone learning from your journey is not you teaching them.
Teaching is a very particular skillset and craft, especially teaching languages. It should be grounded in a teacher’s own experience learning something as it helps them to empathize with the learner but simply talking about how you learned something is not teaching.
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 — I'm claiming that I've rigorously arranged the layering of intuition in this article. This is teaching. You may disagree with the approach but it's not a random braindump of "what I learned".
"hanasimasu" is not exactly wrong; there is a romanization system in which "si" is how you write "shi".
If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language, it behooves you to adopt "si" and "ti", because they bring in a consistency needed by such a system to be complete.
> If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language
That's how all conjugation schemes work. There's nothing weird about this. Stems aren't supposed to exist in the spoken language. But they are observable in the spoken language.
Compare how a modern dictionary will give you ποιέω, a full and fully-inflected word which doesn't actually exist in ancient Greek, as the first principle part of that verb. This is done because the stem of the verb is ποιε-, and the epsilon ending the stem can be easily observed by its effect on most of the conjugational endings. It doesn't happen to affect the first-person singular ending -ω (to be precise, the contraction of ε- with -ω is -ω), so the dictionary form is synthetic, chosen to be informative.
I should have said that they don't exist in the written language; but using an alternative one lets them be written. This is why romaji appears handy in this matter. It lets us have a stem ending in "r", which doesn't change when we have "a", "u", etc after it.
On the matter of 'si' and 'ti', they are not appropriate in a model of modern Japanese, which recognizes e.g. the onset of ち as a phoneme distinct from the onset of と. The orthography uses a digraph / diacritic for this, writing "ちゅ" for the single syllable that belongs in the -u column of the row containing ち, but that's not a reflection of Japanese phonology; it's a historical artifact.
It's still the case that Japanese speakers have difficulty producing the hypothetical sound 'si', but that doesn't mean that the syllable which is notionally given that place in the kana table represents that hypothetical sound. In English we have the very similar rule that the cluster /sj/ may be reduced to /ʃ/, but this obviously doesn't prove that the word "sheep" begins with the phoneme /s/.
> On the matter of 'si' and 'ti', they are not appropriate in a model of modern Japanese
No romanization scheme captures all the phonetic nuances of Japanese.
And neither does the Japanese writing system.
They are not intended to be detailed models of the spoken language.
> that doesn't mean that the syllable which is notionally given that place in the kana table represents that hypothetical sound
It's all convention. The umbrella handle し is also "notionally present" in the table, and represents the sound only by convention.
I have a native language in which the written combination "ni" often, but not always corresponds to a palatized n, very similar to the Japanese one. In other situations, the palatized n has to be explicitly annotated as ň. There are also exceptional siguations, like the names Niagara or Nikaragua, or the word nikotín.
If we were not to have any conventions like this, we would have to write using IPA symbols! That has downsides. One is the proliferation of symbols. The other is the need to adjust the phonetic spellings for regional dialects, and over time as phonetics changes. In other words, the writing system being a detailed model of phonetics is not necessarily a good thing.
> In other words, the writing system being a detailed model of phonetics is not necessarily a good thing.
> No romanization scheme captures all the phonetic nuances of Japanese.
The fact that alveolar and palatalized sibilants both exist as contrasting phonemes is not a "nuance". It will be represented in every writing system that anyone ever puts forward, as indeed it already is.
The only advantage of putting 'si' in a Romanization of Japanese is that it corresponds well to the official alphabetical order of Japan. There is no other reason you'd do it.
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 itself is a reality of the spoken language and how it evolved, whatever way we choose to render it.
Because Japanese does not have both "shi" and "si", and does not have both "tchi" and "ti", the latter are available as a notation to represent the former, and have been so used.
There is no need to encode rules like s* + i -> shi, because that is taken care of by the existing understanding that si encodes shi.
The romaji notation is not phoentically accurate to begin with (and neither are the Japanese writing systems); like it doesn't capture nasalization of G followed by N and what not. The "n" in "na" and oni" is different, yet we don't write ñi or whatever to indicate the palatization. The Hepburn romanization is just based on what is or is not convenient relative to English.
For me the biggest problem was never memorizing the suffixes but determining whether the verb belongs to group 1 or 2. While you can tell immediately that some verbs belong to group 1, the others (e.g. kaeru mentioned in the post) are not so easy (as far as I know there's no algorithm for that and you just need to memorize with every verb to which group it belongs).
this is quite intriguing, as a native speaker and someone with friends trying to learn Japanese, I always had a hard time explaining all the different patterns and just defaulted to "it just is". Will use this in the future!
If it's taking you this much effort to do the trivial conjugations (seriously, the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down, and falls back on "yeah, you just have to memorize the patterns" for た/て forms), yeah, just memorise them. Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you; you actually just have to put the time and effort in.
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 see an opportunity to simplify, you’re welcome to provide a specific suggestion. I find this system rather elegant, and I tried to build it piece by piece because that’s my preferred way both to learn and to teach.
>the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down
The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I don’t consider it more “interesting” and I’d argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise. So I didn’t spend much time on te/ta-form. (That said, even for -te/ta form, I find it calming to think of -nda as a contraction of -nita, and so on, which AFAIK is in the ballpark of what historically happened.)
> Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you
I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if there’s a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it. Even if there’s a layer of memorization and repetition to achieve actual fluency. Japanese conjugation is a rare case where the system actually is very clear and methodical. The article is written for people like me who also prefer to know it. There’s literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I don’t understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
This is a pretty long blog post covering really not very much.
> The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I don’t consider it more “interesting” and I’d argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise.
It's not just te/ta, you don't mention anything other than the basic polite/casual, positive/negative, and desiderative. At the very end you point to conditional and causative but say you haven't studied them, and no mention at all of passive, imperative, causative passive, or volitional.
> I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if there’s a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it.
And how's that working out for you?
> There’s literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I don’t understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
I find it very presumptive to propose to "teach" what you haven't really learnt. How many people have successfully become remotely close to fluent following this approach? It's 0, right? What makes you think you're "teaching" rather than leading people astray?
>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.
>At the very end you point to conditional and causative but say you haven't studied them, and no mention at all of passive, imperative, causative passive, or volitional.
I haven't studied them (as in "what they mean") but I've gone through all tables of "how they attach" as part of researching the article. Let's catalogue them:
- Conditional and casuative: Fully covered by the article's last section.
- Volitional: Same pattern. In article's notation, it's -[y]ou.
- Passive: Same pattern. In article's notation, it's -[r]areru.
- Causative passive: Same pattern. In article's notation, -[s]aserareru. (I guess there's a special case there for when it contracts.)
- Imperative: Genuinely two cases that IMO are easier to teach separately.
If something's actually wrong, please correct it! I think the article gives a genuinely good scaffolding. By the time you get to these advanced cases, you're comfortable enough with the base model to split them up.
>And how's that working out for you?
Can you stop with your condescending sneering? It's working out well for me.
>I find it very presumptive to propose to "teach" what you haven't really learnt.
I think the article is rigorous in the scope it tackles. If it's not, you would have pointed out the mistakes by now. I also think a beginner has full license to teach if they stay rigorous. It's just a market of approaches.
Indeed, especially for a language with forms of verb as regular as in Japanese. The whole language has two and a half irregular verbs. Compare that to Spanish and realize how fortunate you are to study Japanese verbs.
Spanish is not that bad: the conjugations are not gendered, while there are fewer than 20 major irregular patterns and about a dozen especially quirky verbs that you have to memorize in a few tenses (there are no 100% irregular verbs, most have at least some regular forms).
meh, language learning has an inconvenient truth: sometimes it’s just rote memorization. it's the reflexive belief that every human endeavor must have a hidden optimization waiting to be discovered. Language learning is one of those domains that stubbornly replies, "Cool flowchart. Now memorize 500 words and spend 200 hours listening."
There’s no clever engineer hack that replaces time spent with the language. and with regard to japanese, please stay away from romaji, unless you're still in beginner stage and typing things out to communicate words you already know the phonetics to.
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 behind the tables. Especially when it’s so elegant.
The choice of romaji is deliberate for multiple reasons and is defended in the article (with counter-arguments for why it’s bad too).
Categorizing Japanese verbs as -ru or -u requires more context.
I prefer the term "group 2 verbs" to "-ru verbs." Group 2 verbs are verbs that end in -eru or -iru, not just -ru. Of course there are some exceptions, like kaeru, which ends in -eru but is actually a -u verb. Conjugation is easy: remove the final -ru and append -masu, -mashita, etc.
"Group 1 verbs" (again, -u verbs) are verbs that are not group 2 verbs. Conjugation is a bit more difficult because the -nu, -bu, -mu, and -u verbs have many suffixes. However, after memorizing these two (-nbmu and -u, because -nu, -bu, and -mu are almost the same), the rest are easy.
There are only two irregular verbs: kuru and suru. Just memorize them.
I learned Japanese by just memorizing. Once you have memorized enough verbs and their conjugations, you can figure out the conjugation of a new verb even if you don't understand how it works.
there are more irregular verbs than just kuru and suru. iku and aru are also irregular, for example.
Irregulars notwithstanding, the conjugation pattern is actually completely lossless if you just remember the imperative form (e.g. 着ろ kiro, 切れ kire) instead of the infinitive, which is lossy (e.g. 着る kiru, 切る kiru). Then there's no need to have to remember, "oh... is this -iru verb group 1 or group 2?"
I learned this 35 years ago to the tune of Clementine, youre using black sheep, my spouse uses another tune, but what funny is I learned it not with the 'i' endings, but with the dictionary form (sometimes called base-3) 'u' forms.
u tsu ru tte
bu mu nu nde
ku ite, gu ite
without the shi shite as that had been learned well ahead of the lesson adding ta/te forms.
I just think it's interesting how readily a little ditty tune helps people with recall, regardless of the actual tune.
I've generally found this kind of thing annoying in my various attempts to learn languages - in one of my high school spanish classes the teacher thought it was important to have us learn a little song to memorize the six present tense forms of the to-be verb ser: (yo) soy, (tu) eres, (el/ella) es, (nosotros) somos, (vosotros) sois, (ellos/as) son. My thinking was, there's only six forms to memorize, and the verb is an incredibly common one ("to be"!) so they'll get constantly reinforced anyway. The song is silly and isn't really helping anyway.
I feel similarly about the transformations for the Japanese -te forms and -ta past tense marker. The entire system is:
So basically ten patterns which group into 5 subpatterns. There's some logic behind them - the -te and -ta morphemes originally got added to the -i/pre-masu/ren'youkei stem and then underwent some idiosyncratic consonant reductions in godan verbs. But, really, it's only ten patterns, you can just memorize them; and these are incredibly common verb forms that get used all the time so you'll have them reinforced frequently if you are at all engaging with the language. It's a lot less to memorize than if you were learning Ancient Greek or Sanskrit or something.
As someone who's never tried learning Japanese, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the deep dive and am now less afraid to check out some more serious tutorials (though I wish everyone put as much effort into explaining the system behind something so often dismissed as "just memorise it").