[danabramov]

>the explanation here is misleading

Misleading means it leads to a wrong conclusion somewhere. Please demonstrate which wrong conclusion my article is leading to.

>and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration

There is no "dependence" on transliteration per se. I use it as a visual shortcut for moving along the kana row, as I show in the middle of the post using the table. For all the examples we're looking at, the relationship between the mora and the corresponding romaji version is bijective — so there is literally no difference except the notation. I wanted the article to be accessible to someone who's not fluent in kana (and in fact to someone with zero knowledge of Japanese), hence the choice of notation.

>First, there is a clear stem (飲＊), but you just don't know that yet, because you haven't learned kanji

What could kanji possibly have to do with this? We're discussing a thing rooted in phonetics. The verb stem often includes kana in addition to kanji (e.g. 食べ). There's nothing special here about kanji at all.

>To wit: a godan verb [2] shifts from the "u" sound [...] to the "i" sound in the same column of the kana table [...] Then, for casual negative conjugations, you shift to the "a" sound in the same column

Sure, and that's exactly what I'm describing in the article. Why do you need to pretend I'm describing something different? There's even a place in the article where we use the kana table for that. However, since I assume the reader might not want to constantly look at the kana table, I focus on the phonetic intuition. And the phonetic intuition is trivially explained with romaji, which is why I use them.

[timr]

Speaking of defensive…you’re on every comment thread here, arguing with anyone who disagrees with you, even a little. I didn’t say you were “wrong” — I said that your approach isn’t going to work well for most people as they learn, because it’s missing context. I gave you an example in my comment. Take my advice or not, but it’s true.

> What could kanji possibly have to do with this? We're discussing a thing rooted in phonetics.

Your system is using a limited model that explains some things, but doesn’t explain many others. You need the kanji to see the entire elephant.

Obviously linguistics are post hoc explanations of evolved phenomena and never precisely categorize everything, but there’s a more complete system here. It’s best to start learning it early, instead of relying on the crutch of romaji.

> The verb stem often includes kana in addition to kanji (e.g. 食べ). There's nothing special here about kanji at all.

The point was that there’s a clear stem. For godan verbs, the stem is nearly always the kanji. Sometimes, there are only kana (びびる), typically because the kanji is complex. A few times, there are auxiliary kana (e.g. 変わる). For a beginner, this is not important. You’re also mixing ichidan verbs (食べる) where this is the common case (kana from the i or e sounds), with godan verbs, where it is not. Understanding this fact, alone, almost eliminates the need to memorize which verbs are ichidan.

With relatively rare exceptions, the ichidan verb stem contains kana, and the godan verb does not. The major exception class to this for godan verbs is the ~まる intransitive verbs, where the ま/わ remains part of the stem (変わる、閉まる、泊まる、etc). Otherwise, it’s weird stuff like adjectives turned verbs or slang.

Just knowing this gives you a linguistic intuition for identifying and choosing intransitive verbs!

> However, since I assume the reader might not want to constantly look at the kana table,

They don’t need to. They just need to memorize the kana. People keep telling you this across this thread.

Learn the kana, and these conjugation rules become so trivial that you barely even need to “memorize” anything.

> I focus on the phonetic intuition. And the phonetic intuition is trivially explained with romaji, which is why I use them.

Phonetic intuition is good. Doing it via romaji is fine for absolute beginners, but rapidly becomes a hindrance.

[danabramov]

I feel like there’s some kind of miscommunication, and I can’t bridge it, which is driving me a little crazy. I genuinely don’t understand why it’s bad that I wrote something for people who don’t want to depend on fluently reading kana for learning conjugation rules. I genuinely do not see the connection between the two — I don’t think there’s anything “simpler” in seeing how む becomes んだ than in how m_ + ita collapses into nda. It’s literally the same thing. There is no added clarity by using kana. I understand you’re “supposed” to learn it first and so on, but it does not actually aid the process of learning the specific things covered in the post. You mention identification of stems from kanji but this is not the thing I am teaching in the post? It’s about the rewrite rules once you know the stem, not stem detection.

The main thing I don’t get though is… I never claimed my post will be useful to “most people”. Where did you take that claim? Why is everyone assigning that claim to me and then refuting it? I repeatedly said many times in the thread that I don’t expect this to be helpful to anyone except people like me — and everyone is arguing that no, you should do it the other way around. Where is this assumption coming from?

[timr]

> I feel like there’s some kind of miscommunication, and I can’t bridge it, which is driving me a little crazy. I genuinely don’t understand why it’s bad that I wrote something for people who don’t want to depend on fluently reading kana for learning conjugation rules.

I didn't say it was bad. That's the miscommunication. You're taking it personally when people give you advice, and interpreting it as criticism.

(I mean, some people here are probably being obnoxious about it, but that's genuinely not my intent. I said at the very top of my first comment that if your method works for you, great! It's a completely normal part of learning to create explanations that fall apart with additional experience. For whatever it's worth, in the process of writing the previous comment, I looked up some things that refined my own understanding of the linguistics!)

[danabramov]

What is the advice though?

Is it to not write at all about what works for me? Is it to change what I write into the “accepted” approach and away from what I actually wanted to write? Is it to present my writing differently?

What’s the actual thing that you think would make people in this thread happy (or maybe just you for a start). Like outcome-wise. Next time I write, I do… what?

If it’s to use kana in an article like this, it’s kind of like if I painted a picture of a cat and everyone said they would rather see a dog. OK but that’s not what I was painting? I set it as a constraint for myself to not use kana in the article. It would be a completely different article if it used kana, and that article wouldn’t be worth writing to me.

I shared what works for me, not what I’m recommending for everyone else. So what is the advice? Maybe it’s not to write at all? Some secret third thing?

[timr]

I repeated my advice in both replies. You do you, man.

[danabramov]

Is it “learn kana” or something else? I know kana. I’ve read through both replies once more and I can’t find any other unifying thread.

Did you assume that I don’t know kana because I’m not using kana in the article?