[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.