[purpleflashing]

No, that’s just rigorous writing. Rigorous pedagogical approach implies helping other minds to solve problems and obstacles with acquiring knowledge. Your approach results in coincidental learning because you don’t care about the mind of your learners and their problems, you care about your own.

I do suggest to experiment with your writing — try writing only about your own journey (and nothing else!), try sitting down with another person, multiple people, and teaching them the same thing. Try writing a post for them and them only after the session and see whether there are any differences.

A good teacher is not the one who proclaims themselves to be one.

Good luck!

[danabramov]

Let’s just call it a blog post. I used the word “teaching” loosely and didn’t mean to hit a nerve. If somebody else called a carefully assembled sequence of learning units teaching, I wouldn’t blink an eye at that, so I applied this to the post. “Rigorously writing about sharing what I’ve learned in a way that I would’ve found useful” sounds good to me.

[purpleflashing]

>I wouldn’t blink an eye to that

And I said that, in my opinion, this is where your post failed to communicate what you intended to communicate and you have a crowd of “aktshually, this is wrong” in the comments.

Seriously, without any snark intended, if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”.

Bad teaching elicits negative response, so don’t mislead people into thinking you will teach them anything. If they learn because your heuristic works for them, they will.

I might be wrong, of course, but I believe (and hope) that you will have a lot more empathetic and friendly response.

You didn’t hit a nerve, I just like talking about communication and learning.

[danabramov]

> if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”.

This is literally what my post says!!! It’s the entire framing of the post. Please read it:

> i've tried to learn Japanese verb conjugation a few times before. at first, it looks simple (you just swap suffixes!), but there's a lot of nuance that can drag you down as a learner. i found a system i prefer but let me first explain why i struggled. […] i found this approach to teaching deeply frustrating and unsatisfying.

You’re projecting some kind of fantasy onto my post where it’s presumably claiming that it’s the best way to learn or that I’m a great teacher or whatever. Instead the post is literally sharing what worked for me, and what I wish was available.

[purpleflashing]

I did, I didn’t have a problem understanding your goals as I said in one of the comments in the beginning:

> 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)

(you focused on the fact that you also aimed to teach and we discussed that aspect a little bit), but a lot of people in the comments didn’t understand the goal of your post — why do you think it happened?

[danabramov]

My interpretation is that there’s a lot of dogma around how Japanese “should” be learned, in particularly among the English-speaking community. This dogma includes things like “you must learn kana first”, so a romaji-centered article triggered the alarm bells. Then there’s the general distrust of crank-style “beginner discovers the universe and wants to teach everyone” which also has a flavor of “he doesn’t understand that the only true way to achieve fluency is talking to people” and so on. It hit all the common warning flags that set people off, and that emotional reaction is the backbone of the response. It’s not an unfamiliar dynamic, and it’s reminiscent of some programming subcommunities, although in programming this dogmatic “you must learn/teach things this way” norm was more common in 2000s, and has mostly subsided by the end of 2010s. Overall, I get the impression that for a lot of people the difficulty of learning the language, and in particularly the difficulty of teaching it to others, have led to this kind of conviction. Once you’re expressing this kind of righteous rejection, I think it can be tricky to see that it comes across as sneering and gatekeeping when seen from outside your community.

[purpleflashing]

I see. Well, I already outlined why I thought the situation was happening — if you were trying to teach, I think you did it poorly and oscillated in your messaging from “this just works for me, personally” to “this my unorthodox method of teaching/explaining conjunctions in Japanese” (it’s clear even in comments here that you had to clarify multiple times your goals to different users).

Perhaps I am wrong but I personally don’t believe good teaching would get rejected by people (not organizations — this does happen) because of dogma. Being taught/explained something well is a very visceral experience, dogma can’t override it.

The other problem (people mistaking your personal experience for something else) could be improved by changes in your writing and messaging, and this is what I attempted to advise, I suppose. The writing will likely still be misinterpreted to a degree if what you’re saying about dogmatic thinking in the community is true, but, well, that’s the nature of communication — like with teaching, it involves working with particularities of other minds, simply being correct, methodical and rigorous in how you present arguments/topics can still result in failed communication.

Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable conversation. I apologize again if I came off negative or if my criticism was misplaced. Certainly wasn’t my intention. I genuinely enjoy many of the raised topics and was just interested in talking about them.

P.s. I would love read your failed experiences learning the language you mentioned in the blog and the comments here and what/how the traditional methods failed for you, if you ever decide to write about that, btw. I think it is a very beautiful moment when something one struggles with finally “clicks” —- I am fascinated by it and how it happens for different people.