[purpleflashing]

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.

[danabramov]

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.

[purpleflashing]

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.

[danabramov]

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.

[purpleflashing]

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.

[danabramov]

I'm familiar with teaching. It's in a different space (programming) but I've done plenty of highly successful educational writing before. I understand what you're saying and again — 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".

[purpleflashing]

Well, if it’s teaching, it’s not very good then as you don’t seem to know much about your supposed students struggles with learning this concept. You only know your own.

E.g. the visualization you’re proud of — what problem does it solve for your potential learners? Do they actually have this problem? Not your assumption of the problem but you actually seeing them experiencing this problem and offering them visualization and seeing how it helps them to close the gap? If yes, why do you think your approach failed for HN audience?