[danabramov]

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.

The comparable lesson is primarily https://kellenok.github.io/cure-script/7-5-conjugation.html, not the one you quoted. I prefer teaching it before the -te form because it’s more orderly.

If we reorder these two lessons and rely on romaji over kana, you basically get my approach. I found it helpful so I wrote it down.

[zerof1l]

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.

[danabramov]

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.

[zerof1l]

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.