[eska]

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%.

[csande17]

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.

[danabramov]

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.

[csande17]

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.

[danabramov]

> 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.

It’s quite elegant.

[csande17]

"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.

[danabramov]

Okay, that one’s fair! I remember there was also some other one that had it split into two completely different suffixes.

My answer to this is that by the time you’re learning those, you’re already so fluent in conjugation that a couple of special cases will layer on fine. It’s way better then you get in most languages. (And pedantically I’d still say [] works for the cases above, as you’ve shown.)

I honestly don’t understand the cynicism here. If I could read this article when I started learning, it would’ve saved me a ton of time. That’s why I wrote it. I hope it’ll be useful to someone else but it’s fine if not. As an educator I’m proud of how much it crams in that’s usually spread over many weeks, and how the simple model almost perfectly generalizes. But yeah sure it’s making some unorthodox choices and leaves a couple of advanced cases within one indirection. I’m still very happy with it.

[nakedneuron]

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.

[runarberg]

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.

[danabramov]

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.

[nakedneuron]

Thanks for getting back to me, OP. I appreciate.

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.

[danabramov]

Thank you! Appreciate the kindhearted comment.

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.

[danabramov]

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.

[TonyStr]

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.

[danabramov]

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?

[TonyStr]

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.

[danabramov]

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.

[ragazzina]

>in my experience the people who try to be smart and build systems almost never get decent

Do they have more fun than the other learners though?

[dayjaby]

The article could just be two words: ichidan, godan. Done.