[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.