There are lots of people in the comments somehow offended by the author's genuine excitement over the method that worked well enough for them that they wanted to share it.
As someone who's never tried learning Japanese, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the deep dive and am now less afraid to check out some more serious tutorials (though I wish everyone put as much effort into explaining the system behind something so often dismissed as "just memorise it").
As someone who is fluent in Japanese, the thing is that this is not an example of a method that works well, itâs an example of a beginner coming up with an overwrought headcanon (while calling it âsimpleâ, nonetheless!) that ultimately will hinder their understanding, as I will detail elsewhere.
If this was a similar post about programming, it would not get upvoted here because more people would recognise it for what it is: a âMonads are Like Burritosâ post from a well-meaning but misguided beginner.
I used to get these terms mixed up all the time because some textbooks use "Group 1" and "Group 2" to refer to these verbs, but Group 1 doesn't mean ichidan.
For all that I'm not totally sold on this article's idea of "stems" and "suffixes", I think it does a good job of avoiding this pitfall and correctly explaining the groups.
This kind of content is usually shared by people who are learning a language out of genuine interest for the first time. Most of the time it's Japanese because of the popularity manga and anime enjoy, and the challenge of learning a language that's so different from one's mother tongue. There are countless blog posts written by people to whom it "clicks" for the first time, and they excitedly run to their computer to share their novel experience. I don't see anything wrong with this, let them enjoy the moment. But if they stick to their learning routine, they will inevitably learn the truth that is that the only way to learn a language is to interact with it a lot through all possible channels - speaking, listening, reading, writing. Mnemonics may work for some time, but in the end one won't be able to actually use the language if they don't learn it intuitively. And there is also the fact that most of those people live in places where Japanese is not in everyday use, limiting their opportunities to practice it.
> There are lots of people in the comments somehow offended by the author's genuine excitement over the method that worked well enough for them that they wanted to share it.
Did it work for them though? They apparently never got past the basics. So IMO it's more likely the opposite; they've distracted themselves from getting on with learning.
Thanks! Iâd say that a big part of the motivation for me was to show that this piece is orthogonal to the rest of the language. You can sit down and understand how to conjugate almost any word to almost every suffix in the time it takes to read this. Yes â not fluently â and not âunderstandingâ the language â but itâs wild to me that you can do that at all! It wasnât obvious to me that this knowledge is orthogonal to everything else.
Thatâs what motivated me to write about it, really. In language courses all of this is often spread out over weeks or months. I thought it would be fun to write something that you can read in one evening and map out almost the entire system. With no prerequisites.
Because the whole article is built upon a straw man (it's not usually taught the way he claims) and the "method" is just a normal explanation (see this section on wikipedia).
For me the biggest problem was never memorizing the suffixes but determining whether the verb belongs to group 1 or 2. While you can tell immediately that some verbs belong to group 1, the others (e.g. kaeru mentioned in the post) are not so easy (as far as I know there's no algorithm for that and you just need to memorize with every verb to which group it belongs).
I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as ă on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi".
I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.
I feel like youâre going out of your way to misinterpret the article. As the article says below:
> this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
Then the article includes an exercise that verifies the readerâs understanding.
I also included a note:
> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders ă as "si", 〠as "tu", and 㥠as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
Where is the factual mistake here? âsiâ is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji, therefore itâs invalid.
"Factual mistake" is a bit harsh, but the missing piece is that there are multiple ways to romanise Japanese; all of them produce "valid Romaji" but only in the particular system being used. Si is how you write ă in romaji using the kunrei-shiki romanisation. In the Hepburn romanisation it's shi. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#Diffe... .
Kunrei has been deprecated, Hepburn is the official one even the government of Japan recommends these days and matches better the pronunciation of the language.
I see, maybe my use of âromajiâ is sloppy because I implied âHepburn romajiâ specifically because thatâs what I chose in the article. I do explicitly mention that other romanizations exist and that I chose not to use them â so Iâm not worried about misleading someone who reads the article. But on pedantic level I see why âsi doesnât existâ sounds overly broad.
I think also that anyone who's spoken Japanese for a while already has internalized that "si" === "shi" because there literally isn't the sound "si" in modern Japanese, as the other commenters mentioned it's often romanized both as "si" and "shi" in daily life, if you typed "si" into a keyboard it renders ă, it goes on. The original comment on this thread includes one such person who literally didn't follow why "si" is wrong, and I felt the same way too as a long-time Japanese learner. It's a very "copy paste Western language concepts onto Japanese" way of conceptualizing the language, which is IMO a great way to set oneself up for great struggles when trying to learn a language that is structurally different, because it's not the right mental model.
This is pedantic but you're thinking of "romanization", the act of transliterating Japanese with the Roman alphabet (romaji). There are different systems of romanization, most notably Hepburn and Kunrei. In Hepburn shi is correct, in Kunrei si is correct.
It sounds like you're saying "si" are not valid characters in the Roman alphabet.
Ok yea I see what youâre getting at â my terminology was overly narrow. By âromajiâ I specially meant âromanization Iâve chosen for this articleâ. I do offer an explicit note that other romanizations exist, but outside of that note, I tried to stay within a single self-consistent system, so this nuance was lost.
> I feel like youâre going out of your way to misinterpret the article.
Nope. You correct yourself after, sure, but what I wrote is how it came across at the time when reading.
> Where is the factual mistake here? âsiâ is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji
No, that's not what "romaji" means. If you mean Hepburn, say Hepburn. And if you don't know the difference, that's a sign to learn more before presuming to teach others.
> there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. [âŠ] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. [âŠ] i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
Thatâs just false, âsiâ is in the hiragana table as ă. The romanization âsiâ is /si/ which is pronounced [Éi] (or [ÉiÌ„] or some other possibility). This is basic Japanese phonetics.
If you fix all the errors that are in the article, at best there is an argument buried here that Hepburn romanization should not be used to teach Japanese to English speakersâbut I think that point is really my own argument that Iâm making with the fragments of the article that make sense.
Romanization can be more consistent with Japanese phonetics or it can be more consistent with English phonetics, and the Hepburn romanization is more consistent with English phonetics, which is why itâs a good choice for English speakers that donât know Japanese, but a bad choice for English speakers who are trying to learn Japanese.
Okay, weâre fighting over definitions here. There is no âsiâ in Hepburn romanization. I am intentionally using Hepburn romanization in the article. Therefore, in my article âsiâ is a compile error.
You may argue with my choice, or maybe you can argue that referring to cells in Hiragana table solely by my chosen romanization is somehow bad, and I should instead be inconsistent and give the same mora two different romanizations within a single article. Is that what youâre suggesting?
First, As a basic part of Japanese language education, students are expected to be familiar with different romanization systems. If you ask a student where âsiâ is in the table, they should be able to find it. If a student says âitâs not in the tableâ then theyâve failed the lesson or there is something wrong with the teaching material.
Second: am I arguing that the choice of using Hepburn here is somehow bad? Yes, thatâs correct. I think Hepburn is a bad choice here. A good choice is Nihon-shiki. JSL romanization is also fine.
Hepburn is the official romanization chosen by the Japanese government (it's a relatively recent change), kunrei-shiki has been deprecated and all the signs etc are in the process of being converted to Hepburn.
Weâre talking about the same thing but you insist that there is only one angle under which things arenât confusing. I disagree. Thatâs fine. The two systems are isomorphic, and I genuinely believe that, given Iâve described every single caveat of Hepburn in the article, Iâve paid my dues for using it. YMMV. I even include the âfinding in the tableâ part.
I think I agree that Nihon-shiki and explaining it upfront wouldâve made the article more elegant. One constraint I wanted to hit is that a person should be able to read this article with zero knowledge of Japanese, and walk away with being able to conjugate almost every verb to every suffix correctly. This is more of a challenge to myself as a writer than any practical need but hope it shed some light on the choices and the framing. I liked Hepburn because itâs closer to how it sounds. You can imagine Iâm using IPA instead if you want.
The systems are obviously not isomorphicâJapanese kana are not entirely phonetic (they are just mostly so) and the different romanization systems choose differently whether to follow orthography or phonetics more closely.
> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible. Like, if I donât understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together donât produce the right Hepburn in the end?
YMMV indeed, but I think the lesson here is âthis is why you donât use Hepburn when youâre writing an article about Japanese verb conjugationsâ.
Hepburn does make sense for somebody with zero knowledge of Japanese but it just gets in the way when you are trying to explain how Japanese works. So lesson zero is âdonât rely on Hepburnâ and IMO if you are interested in pronunciation and listening you should be using audio as your primary source.
Iâm saying that Hepburn is isomorphic to Nihon-shiki since each is an encoding of kana. Each of them is a bijection to kana (actually thatâs wrong; see EDIT below), therefore thereâs a bijection between them. Obviously Iâm not saying that arbitrary latin characters are isomorphic to kana, that would make zero sense.
I sympathise with your point about the benefits of Nihon-shiki romanization here. It mightâve been a better choice for this article.
> I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible
I think the reader would just read the next section where I use your argument to critique my own approach? And then make up their own mind whether itâs defensible to do something in the article, to raise pros/cons for why I did it, and then to keep on with the choice.
I wanted to illustrate this confusing point, and thatâs how I chose to illustrate it. I think itâs confusing either way. I trust that a reader who actually wants to learn, and isnât just being a pedant, would carry away the right set of conclusions, and would understand the isomorphism (again â see EDIT below) after those two sections.
> Like, if I donât understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together donât produce the right Hepburn in the end?
Yeah. So thatâs a learning opportunity that kana row shifting doesnât quite follow rules you might expect from many other languages. Maybe thatâs a clunky way to introduce it. I personally like this framing. As I noted somewhere else, you could imagine that Iâve chosen IPA notation instead.
â
EDIT: Actually wait, Hepburn is not bijective for zu and ji. I havenât thought about that. Itâs not relevant to any of the conjugations so it doesnât break the article, but that may be a good argument that itâs not worth the effort rescuing Hepburn.
> I think the reader would just read the next section where I use your argument to critique my own approach? And then make up their own mind whether itâs defensible to do something in the article, to raise pros/cons for why I did it, and then to keep on with the choice.
I think thatâs a long wait; I donât want to rely too heavily on analogies but it is like teaching somebody arithmetic roman numerals and then explaining in a parenthetical that there are other ways to do arithmetic (but not naming them). Maybe the reader can make up their own mindâbut I donât think the pros and cons are raised in the article, or if the are raised, I couldnât find it.
I donât want to pile on here but it sounds like you are, in this conversation, learning about why the different romanizations exist and what the pros and cons are. Or if you already knew, you are getting what they call an object lesson. (Like you notedâin Hepburn, ji and zu correspond to two different kana each.)
> As I noted somewhere else, you could imagine that Iâve chosen IPA notation instead.
This just resurfaces a similar problem with different symbolsâif you put your IPA notation in slashes // you get phonemes, which will get you something mostly equivalent to Kunrei-shiki romanization. If you put your IPA in brackets [] then you get something sort of equivalent to Hepburn (in that itâs designed to show pronunciation). Both choices will on some level obscure a regular pattern that could be revealed with kana or romaji. Orthography is funny like that; in both Japanese and English it can show the origin of words even when the pronunciation changes.
I think the other lesson here is that students will mostly learn morphophonology intuitively by absorbing examples with some light explanations of the rules, and if you overexplain the rules you end up with too much âscaffoldingâ which gets in the way. Like when people use mnemonics or try to memorize kanji by thinking pictorially.
I genuinely havenât thought about zu/ji here (conceded!) Itâs not relevant to conjugation though.
In general, I find your attitude a bit condescending. This is what I wrote about my choice:
> note i could also have used a different romanization that renders ă as "si", 〠as "tu", and 㥠as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head
My main mistake seems to be meaning â[Hepburn] romajiâ by writing âromajiâ. I was obviously aware of other systems because that is what the sentence says but I thought itâs acceptable to refer to Hepburn as just âromajiâ as a sort of the default one. Maybe thatâs wrong.
Other than this terminology nit, I think Iâve made myself quite clear there. I genuinely donât think itâs a big deal. Maybe I overestimate my readersâ intelligence but I donât find this difficult to live with at all once you get it.
Roman numerals is a funny parallel but it doesnât hold very well. The difficulty of using Hepburn is O(1) shortcut: for conjugation, you only have to ârememberâ three special cases and theyâre always applied just-in-time. Itâs just substitutions â and are arguably inherent phonetically. Arithmetic with Roman numerals requires many stacked adjustments where you have to match pairs of things. And lack of orders really screws with ability to do multiplication. This just isnât an intellectually honest comparison.
Re: your last point I actually kind of agree. Iâm that annoying student who likes to un-extrapolate backwards from examples to the rules, knowing which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, after which I can go back to examples. My article is for people like me. Maybe thereâs a few more of them.
Actually let me just try to explain my pedagogical approach and philosophy here. Maybe that makes it clearer.
I assume no prerequisites at first. So my reader has never seen a kana table and doesnât know which syllables exist.
I choose to teach conjugation first. Thatâs an unorthodox choice but I like it! Thatâs what I set out to do. So we get far enough until it breaks down. And it breaks down when a rule (which worked so far) doesnât help with âsâ because saying âsiâ would sound wrong.
Thatâs the moment I use to teach kana table and its importance. This âyou made a mistakeâ is a pedagogical vehicle for introducing kana rows. And we go over the exact ones that youâd make a mistake with. So each special case is walked through.
At this point we could discard Hepburn but I choose to keep going because if you know special cases, thereâs no issue. And at some point youâll learn kana anyway.
So thatâs how I chose to layer it. Maybe itâs a bit unholy but I like it. It is definitely self-consistent.
I understand why you wrote the article this way, I think the lesson here is âwe have learned why Japanese textbooks do not teach the content in this orderâ and there are a couple reasons why this order is not good:
1. It relies on people not understanding certain things. In general, you cannot expect people to have exactly the right misunderstanding necessary for a lesson.
2. Spending extra time with Hepburn reinforces it, and it shouldnât be reinforced.
I am in general extremely skeptical of lessons which try to engineer a way for the students to make mistakes. What I have seen in real classrooms and in informal teaching is that the mistakes are habit-forming and the outcomes of this kind of engineering are unpredictable.
Mistakes are appealing to the developers on HN because we understand things more by seeing them fail. But this does not mean that you can engineer somebody to experience the same moment of enlightenment that you did, because it requires constructing the same (incorrect) mental model that you had when you made that mistake that led to useful insight, and it both difficult and counterproductive to try and make that happen to students. Give people the best chances to learn by giving them the best chances to avoid mistakes, and the mistakes and insight will happen organically on their own, in unique ways for each student.
> In general, I find your attitude a bit condescending.
YeahâI can understand why Iâd come across as condescending. Thereâs a balance hereâI want to be clear when I say that I have problems with the article, but I donât want to be hurtful and I donât want to make criticisms that are not supported by the text.
Rather than defend my comments as âcorrectâ letâs say that I failed in my goals of not coming across as condescending. The reason I want to frame it this way is that similarly, I think the article failed in its goals as coming across (to me) as âlook at this neat thing about Japaneseâ.
It is just kind of the nature of written communication that it takes a lot of editing and polish to make it clear, correct, and concise. I had the good fortune to sign up for Japanese 101 when my professor was in the middle of writing a new Japanese textbookâit was pretty exciting, with the changing lesson plans, the flock of masterâs students hanging around, revisions and drafts to teaching materials, and those endless hours of classroom observation. The teachers occasionally gave us a âpeek behind the curtainâ and explained why they chose to teach things a certain way or another. Iâve rarely gotten that kind of explanation in any class that Iâve taken so I thought it was pretty special.
I donât expect you to put in the textbook-level of polish into your article but there is a kind of verbosity (the article is long, which makes it kind of hard to respond to because there is just so much to sift through), there are some problems with clarity (the issue of romanization and orthography is mixed in with the conjugation, and maybe it would be better to separate those issues) some problems with correctness (various) and some problems with completeness (the patterns omit some conjugations that I think you donât know, and I donât think they follow the pattern).
I have certainly put effort into articles that have gotten brutal negative feedback; I think it was right for me to write the article, and then feel like shit from the feedback, and then maybe retract and revise it. If there is one actual error here, a true error, I think the error is fighting out criticism in the HN comments.
> My main mistake seems to be meaning â[Hepburn] romajiâ by writing âromajiâ. I was obviously aware of other systems because that is what the sentence says but I thought itâs acceptable to refer to Hepburn as just âromajiâ as a sort of the default one.
"Romaji" does not (in English) mean "romanisation", as most people who've studied Japanese to at least beginner level know.
I've looked at over a dozen hiragana tables and they all use Hepburn romanization.
Obsessing over romanization, something that a student ought to outgrow, is a sure fire way for a student to get overwhelmed by irrelevant details that discourage learning. The hard part is putting in the work, not learning less than a dozen exceptions.
I think itâs probably a mistake to use Hepburn if youâre learning Japanese, it kinda gets in the way. Either learn kana (which takes what, a week?) or use one of the other romanization systems which maps more cleanly to Japanese orthography
I've never understood how people can claim that learning kana takes a week. It clearly takes more time than that, considering how similar some of the symbols are and a lot of them only differ by double dashes or a stroke (think nu vs me, ne vs re, ro vs ru, chi vs sa, and so on). Then there are the combinations and even if you managed to learn hiragana, you still have to learn katakana.
Oh and I forgot, you have to actually learn how to listen, pronounce and speak them, not just learn a useless romanization mapping. I've heard way too many English speakers just say the romanization with English pronunciation. At that point their learning efforts turn into self sabotage.
In total that's definitively a month of effort, albeit spread out over the first year of learning.
Itâs a deliberate choice in the article. I cover every single caveat with it explicitly. I also mention this:
> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders ă as "si", 〠as "tu", and 㥠as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
I think the choice is not a good one, whether it is deliberate or by accident, it is not a good choice either way. The main caveat to Hepburn is that itâs unsuitable for explaining how Japanese works and itâs unsuitable for learning Japaneseâso before you start working on verb conjugations, you pick up kana or one of the romanizations which is more aligned with Japanese.
The idea that you âshouldnât think in romajiâ is really âyou shouldnât think in Hepburnâ. This is an important distinction! Japanese has a relatively small inventory of phonemes, somewhere around 20 or 22 of them, and they map very neatly to the latin alphabet.
But the article doesnât make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.
IMO, this is kind of like seeing an article about how monads are burritos. Thinking that a monad is a burrito does not help me understand monads.
Nomu -> noma-nai / nomi-masu / nome-ru / nomo-u
Miru -> mi-nai / mi-masu / mire-ru / miyo-u
The ichidan and godan verbs are not assigned different categories because existing scholars of Japanese are just bad at explaining how they work, and you can still understand them just fine in romaji. I put the hyphens above to mark a place where you could think that the verb ends and the common conjugation forms end, and you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the âtricksââbut some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out (are you familiar with miru -> miyou conjugation, or miru -> mirareru?)
I concede that using Nihon-shiki maybe wouldâve been more elegant for what I tried to do in the article.
> But the article doesnât make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.
Not at all. I give it two sections and then we move on. It doesnât affect literally anything else on the page. You just learn to shift rows and move on. To make what points?
> you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the âtricksââbut some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out
Iâm not quite sure what you mean to say in this part. I do cover -[r]eba and -[y]ou in the final section (âone more thingâ) which extends the model to clearly handle that disappearing consonant. I think -[r]eru fits in there the same way, just as -[r]u itself.
I think explaining it as mi + [y]ou = miyou, but nom_ + [y]ou = nomou is a clearer way to think about this. The rule is that the hole burns down the leading consonant (but takes the vowel).
The Japanese phonological system doesn't allow a /s/ sound to occur before the vowel /i/, the consonant must undergo palatalization and become /É/ (the IPA symbol for the Japanese sh-like sound). Because this is a regular sound rule, the native writing system doesn't have a way to distinguish the nonexistent */si/ sequence from the /Éi/ sequence that actually occurs, and this is the syllable that hiragana ă or katakana ă· indicate.
In the Hepburn romanization system, which generally tries to be transparent to speakers of English or other European languages, ă is romanized as _shi_, because this indicates to English speakers that the /s/ -> /É/ sound change happens. In the Kunrei-siki romanization system, which tries to be more faithful to the distinctions made in the Japanese phonological system, ă is romanized as _si_ to be consistent with the other possible syllables _sa_ _su_ _se_ _so_ that begin with the consonant /s/.
And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet is a sign that their command of Japanese isn't all that good yet.
> And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet
I donât understand where this misunderstanding about my article comes from. I am saying that the sound at the intersection of âsâ column and âiâ row is âshiâ. My article uses romaji so this is self-consistent. I am also mentioning that there is an alternative system that would romanize it as âsiâ but thatâs not the one Iâm using in my article.
> I am saying that the sound at the intersection of âsâ column and âiâ row is âshiâ.
That is exactly the problem. Japanese doesn't distinguish between 'shi' and si', so all you're really gaining by pointing that out is learning how to correctly romanize Japanese, in a single system. Instead of learning the language you're learning how to represent the language in a foreign way.
The rule 0 of learning a language is to get rid of the crutches as soon as possible. Use their native writing system (or if they're one of the latin alphabet users, use their pronunciation rule), learn words of the target language using said language, and learn how to formulate concepts with the language rather than translating it from what you already know. Crutches should only be used to get to this point and no more. If you do that, details like 'si' and 'shi' are not even worth mentioning. Romanization methods have their own goals, and rarely is it about facilitating language learning.
As someone that recently went through an introductory Japanese course in Japan, I don't find this much different than how it's taught. Or maybe I'm missing something?
It seems like the article is trying to make the case that in romaji, you can split the letters and isolate the vowel (e.g. the asterix in the article's conjugation).
But we were simply taught to change from the ă- row to the ă- row (u- row to i- row). I switched to Japanese to illustrate that you can make that statement even without romaji. In that case, it seems like basically the same thing?
As an anecdotal point, my class was mostly non-english speakers and I didn't find the above to be a sticking point for my classmates. The real sticking points were messing up the ichidan verb exceptions (ichidan verbs that look like godan) and conjugating the correct form for the different grammar points. Te and ta form were also a bit tricky. But the article doesn't seem to offer anything new to help there.
If youâre taught to shift rows, and you already comfortably think in kana â yes, I think thatâs equally good. Some of the materials Iâve tried learning from when I got started with the language didnât do that, and instead described each case as special. Thatâs what I didnât like.
That said, part of the challenge to myself with this article was to allow someone to learn Japanese conjugation even if they have zero knowledge of the language (even no kana). So thatâs another constraint influencing my choice. I also wanted to have the visual âgluingâ throughout the article as an aid for intuition, so thatâs another reason I used romaji.
I've found that any resource relying on any romaji after the first chapter or two is often a complete waste of time.
It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.
This is true, the only practical place where romaji might be used daily is for IME input.
This is why I think all the commenters obsessing over romaji just add fuel to the fire by being elitist over something that should only matter to an absolute beginner.
It's especially vain if the primary reason to choose one romanization strategy over another is to save keystrokes on a keyboard.
Iâve explicitly addressed this in the article. Cmd+F for a section called âwhy romaji is actually goodâ and then âwhy romaji is actually badâ. You may disagree with the approach, but I outlined my reasons for choosing it (as well as its downsides).
You glossed over my point. Iâm not using it as a âcrutchâ for reading. Iâm using it to have notation for the stem â the thing before -u. I could choose alternative notation with kana (e.g. just always using the -u ending, or the idea of variable stems like i-stem and a-stem) but then the visual âgluingâ wouldnât work. Which is the whole point of mental model Iâm communicating. Itâs fine if you donât find this mental model helpful but itâs the point of the article.
Iâll be honest that I also wanted (as a challenge) to write this article so that a person with zero Japanese knowledge would be able to correctly conjugate almost every word to every ending. This is more of a teaching drill for myself though but itâs another reason for the romaji choice.
The explanation made sense to me: romaji works well for vowel shifts (as the vowels aren't glued to consonants) while kana works well for consonant shifts (because the vowels are glued to consonants).
Latin text's smaller tokens/phonemes have advantages and disadvantages, but they are a convenient notation for getting the author's point across.
The difference in phonemes reminds me of how game designer Naramura came up with the (Spanish-sounding) name "La Mulana" for his game by spelling his name backwards in kana. In romaji it would have been "Arumaran" which is completely different (while in kanji it would have been "Muranara".)
Not quite. If you change the order of some kanji, the general case is that the resulting text has no definite pronunciation. You definitely would not expect that the sounds assigned to the kanji in one ordering would be the same ones assigned in a new ordering.
This is a phenomenon the Japanese sometimes play with. In the novel Musashi, Musashi comes up with that name by reinterpreting the characters of his actual name (which, in the novel, is TakezĆ).
Agree. Especially how easy it is honestly to learn hiragana. You can practically learn it in a day and keep a table next to you to look up every time you forget one.
If you're at the point you're learning verbs you'd be mad not to know how to read some kana.
The benefit you give (be able to "cut" a kana in the middle) is really weak, I've never seen anyone being confused by that when learning in kana.
This is completely nullified by all the drawbacks of using romaji while learning and they're well known already.
The only reason to use romaji for Japanese grammar is to explain the concepts to someone who has no interest in learning the language, just for their general knowledge.
The comments to this article are another example of something I see so often in Japanese language learning dicussions I see online. It's always filled with debate, disagreement, arguements over incredible subtle things, and everyone trying to optimize the best method. It can be really discouraging space for early learners.
It's not discouraging at all. Japanese concepts do not have a 1-1 mapping with English concepts, so there is a lot of debate about how it can be taught. I find it fascinating.
Theorycrafting efficient ways of learning Japanese while being barely conversational yourself is a completely different hobby from actually learning Japanese (or actually studying the teaching of Japanese), and sadly in online spaces the former often swamps out discussion of the latter.
The online spaces can be really discouraging, trueâbut it can also be really discouraging to be in a classroom or in a foreign country, struggling to use a language you barely know. Meanwhile, there are also a lot of ways to spend effort trying to learn a language without gaining mastery. Truly frustrating.
If you want some decent level of fluency then there is something you have to do, which is to communicate with other people in context and with specific goals in mind (get information, give information, make a request, etc). Whatever you can do to arrange for that to happen is probably more valuable than anything you can do online or with books. I personally like to recommend finding classes at a local college.
If you canât get that, then I think the next best thing is reading and listening.
Drills are also necessary but you can easily fill your time with drills without advancing your ability to communicate or understand people.
There is plenty of research about what is / is not effective when it comes to learning languages so I encourage people to at least take a look at the results of that research rather than just go with whatever people recommend online (Iâm just some random person online, I may be no better than the next). AI tools reportedly have a positive effect but they are not nearly as good as human interaction.
Author here â itâs a really fun, elegant, and beautiful language. I highly recommend it if youâre interested. Maybe controversial but I think you can largely ignore the Japanese-learning community if/when the vibe isnât right.
Mostly it helps to find learning resources that gel with your style of learning, and if possible, a tutor so you have a roadmap and more motivation. I found mine on italki. I also find Claude very helpful for sentence drills based on words and grammar I know.
Japanese language learning environments really are ridiculously hostile and I've stopped engaging with them unless im searching for a specific resource.
I've dabbled a bit in Mandarin and while eventually i ended up liking Japanese more as a language, the Mandarin language learner community felt like such a warm bath in comparison. The people were friendly and welcoming and willing to help and genuinely excited to find more people wanting to learn the language.
It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
Mu, bu and nu also all obey the -nda transformation due to phonetics, and not due to how "if we just shuffle the letters around and presto! Nomu becomes nonda".
Japanese already has plenty of its own reading inconsistencies, so adding another layer on top isn't going to help you.
Finally, there's going to be so much kana in your every day life that learning conjugation in romaji is guaranteed to cripple your reading, because instead of recognizing kana (e.g. you see a billboard that says ăè¶ăéŁČăă æčăăăïŒ as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go) you've spent the first n hours on trying to "hack" the language instead of just learning it.
> It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu".
All of this is described just below, in the section called âwhy romaji is actually badâ, with these specific examples being tested.
> It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
This is also described further below in the post.
> as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go
I see âunderstanding the systemâ and âapplying it fluentlyâ as two separate activities. I find romaji more illustrative for the former because the system is phonetical on a sub-mora level. Whereas kana is more helpful for the latter. I donât assume my reader is an idiot, and so I assume that they would be able to pick the right tool for the job on their learning journey. The fluency always layers on separately anyway, understanding doesnât âhelpâ there. Itâs just that personally I find understanding a great motivator (and fallback) for developing fluency.
-u godan verbs historically ended in ă” /fu/ (and earlier /pu/), and were written that way until the 20th century kana reform. So the historical conjugation pattern of a verb like tamau was tamafa-/tamafi-/tamafu-/tamafe- + additional inflectional endings. The /f/ became a /w/ before /a/ but weakened and was lost entirely in other positions, leading to the modern pattern of tamau, tamaimasu, etc. but tamawanai.
And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english. Complaining that there's no english equivalent of the russian (ĐČзглŃĐŽ / vzglyad)'s initial cluster would be similar in feel - no english words use it, so the romanization can be whatever you like, really.
> And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english.
Erm, wtf? The English "si" sound does exist and sounds different from ă. There is a reason people don't want to write Sinzyuku, and while I think they're making the wrong tradeoff, it is a tradeoff and should be acknowledged as such.
"As a result, the sequences [ti si di (d)zi] do not occur in native or Sino-Japanese vocabulary."[1] Unless I'm missing something, Japanese phonology doesn't include the sound english has as "si", only "shi"? I'm not a native speaker though, it's entirely possible that I am missing something.
Funny how some conjugated forms of verbs collide with dictionary forms of other verbs (esp. if we ignore pitch accent differences):
E.g. potential of èČ·ă (kau, to buy) is èČ·ăă (kaeru), which is spelled like ćž°ă (kaeru, to return home).
It reminds of you how "lay" is a verb (to put something into a flat resting position, but is also the past tense of "to lie" (take on a supine position).
Today, I lay bricks; yesterday I lay in bed all day.
Plus lie and lie are examples of how English verbs can be homonyms in dictionary form, but conjugate differently, something we see in Japanese (either actual homonyms or near homonyms modulo pitch accent).
I started to learn Japanese 30 years ago, and in my experience the people who try to be smart and build systems almost never get decent. Itâs procrastination while thinking theyâre actually productive.
To add insult to injury this article hasnât discovered anything new, makes it sound way more complicated than it is, and in the end still requires you to just remember which verbs are of the eru/iru group, and which are not (which was posed as a problem to solve in the intro).
Just make cards and mark the stem, learn it along with the verb. No need for heuristics. If you ever forget, youâre bound to remember the masu-form and can reverse engineer the stem from that 100%.
Similarly, when complaining about how you have to memorize a big table of verb conjugations in the intro, the author links to a table of... -ta forms, a verb form for which the author later concludes you just have to memorize a big table.
The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system that doesnât reduce further. I think thereâs still value in having a solid model for everything else. At least I personally found it valuable, which is why I thought to share it with people.
I'm not totally sure this "stems and suffixes" mental model really works well for everything else. Forms like the imperative (éŁăčă), volitional (éŁăčăă), provisional (éŁăčăă°), potential (éŁăčăăă), and causative (éŁăčăăă) aren't cleanly handled either -- they work similarly for godan verbs, but you have to add a different suffix for ichidan verbs.
It's definitely useful to understand how "chi" and "tsu" fit into the hiragana chart, and if your asterisk notation helps you remember which verbs are ichidan vs godan then that's great, but I'm not sure it's worth trying to unify -masu and -nai into one model.
> Forms like the imperative (éŁăčă), volitional (éŁăčăă), provisional (éŁăčăă°), potential (éŁăčăăă), and causative (éŁăčăăă) aren't cleanly handled either -- they work similarly for godan verbs, but you have to add a different suffix for ichidan verbs.
They are cleanly handled in the final section (âone more thingâ) that introduces a notion of disappearing consonant like -[r]u, -[r]eba and so on, and gives a rule for it. This is a perfect inversion of what happens with -(i)masu and friends. The hole in the stem accepts the leading vowel but burns down the leading consonant.
"Disappearing consonant" doesn't work for the potential form, unless you expand the representation to allow writing -[rar]eru. (Edit: And I think imperative would require like "-[ro](e)".)
Which, like, is clean in the sense that Redux is technically Turing-complete (you can encompass _any_ difference between two strings by saying that one string uses the stuff in brackets and the other string uses the stuff in parentheses), but that doesn't make it a good idea.
Okay, that oneâs fair! I remember there was also some other one that had it split into two completely different suffixes.
My answer to this is that by the time youâre learning those, youâre already so fluent in conjugation that a couple of special cases will layer on fine. Itâs way better then you get in most languages. (And pedantically Iâd still say [] works for the cases above, as youâve shown.)
I honestly donât understand the cynicism here. If I could read this article when I started learning, it wouldâve saved me a ton of time. Thatâs why I wrote it. I hope itâll be useful to someone else but itâs fine if not. As an educator Iâm proud of how much it crams in thatâs usually spread over many weeks, and how the simple model almost perfectly generalizes. But yeah sure itâs making some unorthodox choices and leaves a couple of advanced cases within one indirection. Iâm still very happy with it.
Why would you expect the article where Iâm describing what worked for me to âdiscover something newâ? Iâm literally sharing the mental model that I personally found helpful. Thereâs nothing ânewâ in learning or teaching a language. But this is the most minimal model Iâve found useful, compared to others, and I wanted to share it with other people.
I think youâre taking a lot of stuff for granted. âJustâ do cards etc. Youâre using the word âstemâ but whatâs a stem? Why do we sometimes inject -i or -a (or -wa) there and sometimes we donât? You still have to learn that and understand that. Thatâs what Iâm describing in the article. If you already know stems and how they compose with suffixes, congratulations, you wonât find my article useful.
Honestly, you don't need to "learn" or "understand" much grammar explicitly. I think it definitely helps get you off your feet, as you can "decode" sentences if you remember grammar rules, but eventually the grammar has to be internalized anyway. This happens when you are repeatedly exposed to the same patterns in context. I don't know how English or Norwegian grammar works, and I'm fluent in those. I skipped grammar in Japanese and focused on reading, yet I can understand most things and I can tell when something sounds wrong.
One big change I had when learning Japanese was that someone introduced to me Cure Dolly videos on YouTube, and it has been an eye-opener: All these verb conjugations are actually attaching another verb to extend its meaning
"hanasimasu" is not exactly wrong; there is a romanization system in which "si" is how you write "shi".
If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language, it behooves you to adopt "si" and "ti", because they bring in a consistency needed by such a system to be complete.
> If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language
That's how all conjugation schemes work. There's nothing weird about this. Stems aren't supposed to exist in the spoken language. But they are observable in the spoken language.
Compare how a modern dictionary will give you ÏÎżÎčÎÏ, a full and fully-inflected word which doesn't actually exist in ancient Greek, as the first principle part of that verb. This is done because the stem of the verb is ÏÎżÎčΔ-, and the epsilon ending the stem can be easily observed by its effect on most of the conjugational endings. It doesn't happen to affect the first-person singular ending -Ï (to be precise, the contraction of Δ- with -Ï is -Ï), so the dictionary form is synthetic, chosen to be informative.
First, we learnt verbs in the -masu form. Nomimasu, tabemasu and so on.
Then we learnt this song (to the tune of Clementine)
chi ri i tte
mi ni bi nde
kiite
giite
It's a quick mneumonic to help you go from the polite verb to the "te-form" ending. I hummed it in my head while working out the conjugation before it became natural and "obvious".
Japanese is known as an agglutinative language [0], and how verbs are conjugated also has a lot to do with politeness, as well as local dialects. That's why you can turn on an anime and hardly understand it, even after a couple years of study.
I got to the third year college level in my own Japanese studies, and at that point, memorizing kanji was starting to compete with my computer science studies, so I had to drop it. I got to travel to Japan and live with host families (we kind of settled on a Japanese/English pidgin), so I don't regret the experience.
Romaji are great, and in some ways more instructive because they reveal patterns which are otherwise a little hidden. You just have to realize that S+I is shi, T+U is tsu, etc. I donât want to get too deep into it but there is a regularity to the language, and rules, and different choices of writing system reveals different pieces of the puzzle.
Next, the conjugation itself. There are massive categories of conjugations missing! Like, how do you get from taberu / nomu in this system to tabereru / nomereru? It turns out that these ichidan and godan verbs actually do have some differences in conjugation. Whoâd have thought? (There is the -i stem, but there are other forms.)
Both of these things are described in the article. The first one is in âwhy romaji is actually badâ section, the second one is in âone more thingâ part at the very end.
Fun, and a programmatic perspective. However, it can be too easy and fun to get super caught up in these details, if your goals are some level of fluency and ability to communicate/read. The majority of people that I know who have gained any level of fluency in Japanese as an adult mostly avoided stuff like this because (for many people; of course everybody is different) doing all of this mental math to dive down to the last detail was nowhere near as effective as some speaking and reading drills.
Maybe itâs not very clear but I donât suggest studying from articles like this alone. Obviously you need to do sentence drills and talk to a tutor or native speakers to have any chance of success. I still find documenting my mental model helpful because most articles Iâve seen before were not teaching it clearly enough for my taste.
By all means, it is fun to play with a language. And every person's brain works differently.
I like to use this metaphor, though. You're hiking a mountain, this journey to the "peak" is reaching some goal of fluency.
It's fun to stop and look at rocks, examining, comparing and whatnot. But it doesn't necessarily get you closer to the peak. I mean, it might, because you'll better understand your footing every-so-slightly. Not a perfect metaphor.
If it's taking you this much effort to do the trivial conjugations (seriously, the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down, and falls back on "yeah, you just have to memorize the patterns" for ă/㊠forms), yeah, just memorise them. Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you; you actually just have to put the time and effort in.
I prefer having a system to simply memorizing. I donât know what you mean by âso much effortâ. I am literally just describing the system as it is brick by brick. If you see an opportunity to simplify, youâre welcome to provide a specific suggestion. I find this system rather elegant, and I tried to build it piece by piece because thatâs my preferred way both to learn and to teach.
>the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down
The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I donât consider it more âinterestingâ and Iâd argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise. So I didnât spend much time on te/ta-form. (That said, even for -te/ta form, I find it calming to think of -nda as a contraction of -nita, and so on, which AFAIK is in the ballpark of what historically happened.)
> Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you
I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if thereâs a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it. Even if thereâs a layer of memorization and repetition to achieve actual fluency. Japanese conjugation is a rare case where the system actually is very clear and methodical. The article is written for people like me who also prefer to know it. Thereâs literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I donât understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
> I donât know what you mean by âso much effortâ.
This is a pretty long blog post covering really not very much.
> The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I donât consider it more âinterestingâ and Iâd argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise.
It's not just te/ta, you don't mention anything other than the basic polite/casual, positive/negative, and desiderative. At the very end you point to conditional and causative but say you haven't studied them, and no mention at all of passive, imperative, causative passive, or volitional.
> I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if thereâs a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it.
And how's that working out for you?
> Thereâs literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I donât understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
I find it very presumptive to propose to "teach" what you haven't really learnt. How many people have successfully become remotely close to fluent following this approach? It's 0, right? What makes you think you're "teaching" rather than leading people astray?
Indeed, especially for a language with forms of verb as regular as in Japanese. The whole language has two and a half irregular verbs. Compare that to Spanish and realize how fortunate you are to study Japanese verbs.
this is quite intriguing, as a native speaker and someone with friends trying to learn Japanese, I always had a hard time explaining all the different patterns and just defaulted to "it just is". Will use this in the future!
Categorizing Japanese verbs as -ru or -u requires more context.
I prefer the term "group 2 verbs" to "-ru verbs." Group 2 verbs are verbs that end in -eru or -iru, not just -ru. Of course there are some exceptions, like kaeru, which ends in -eru but is actually a -u verb. Conjugation is easy: remove the final -ru and append -masu, -mashita, etc.
"Group 1 verbs" (again, -u verbs) are verbs that are not group 2 verbs. Conjugation is a bit more difficult because the -nu, -bu, -mu, and -u verbs have many suffixes. However, after memorizing these two (-nbmu and -u, because -nu, -bu, and -mu are almost the same), the rest are easy.
There are only two irregular verbs: kuru and suru. Just memorize them.
I learned Japanese by just memorizing. Once you have memorized enough verbs and their conjugations, you can figure out the conjugation of a new verb even if you don't understand how it works.
there are more irregular verbs than just kuru and suru. iku and aru are also irregular, for example.
Irregulars notwithstanding, the conjugation pattern is actually completely lossless if you just remember the imperative form (e.g. çă kiro, ćă kire) instead of the infinitive, which is lossy (e.g. çă kiru, ćă kiru). Then there's no need to have to remember, "oh... is this -iru verb group 1 or group 2?"
Theyâre sometimes called âsemi-irregularâ because they are mostly regular with, like, one deviation. The list is not long and it is quick to memorize.
meh, language learning has an inconvenient truth: sometimes itâs just rote memorization. it's the reflexive belief that every human endeavor must have a hidden optimization waiting to be discovered. Language learning is one of those domains that stubbornly replies, "Cool flowchart. Now memorize 500 words and spend 200 hours listening."
Thereâs no clever engineer hack that replaces time spent with the language. and with regard to japanese, please stay away from romaji, unless you're still in beginner stage and typing things out to communicate words you already know the phonetics to.
I mean I think itâs both! As an author, I wrote this to settle my mental model. This doesnât mean I could use it during fast speech, but I find it calming to understand the actual linguistic system behind the tables. Especially when itâs so elegant.
The choice of romaji is deliberate for multiple reasons and is defended in the article (with counter-arguments for why itâs bad too).
I learned this 35 years ago to the tune of Clementine, youre using black sheep, my spouse uses another tune, but what funny is I learned it not with the 'i' endings, but with the dictionary form (sometimes called base-3) 'u' forms.
u tsu ru tte
bu mu nu nde
ku ite, gu ite
without the shi shite as that had been learned well ahead of the lesson adding ta/te forms.
I just think it's interesting how readily a little ditty tune helps people with recall, regardless of the actual tune.
There are lots of people in the comments somehow offended by the author's genuine excitement over the method that worked well enough for them that they wanted to share it.
As someone who's never tried learning Japanese, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the deep dive and am now less afraid to check out some more serious tutorials (though I wish everyone put as much effort into explaining the system behind something so often dismissed as "just memorise it").
As someone who is fluent in Japanese, the thing is that this is not an example of a method that works well, itâs an example of a beginner coming up with an overwrought headcanon (while calling it âsimpleâ, nonetheless!) that ultimately will hinder their understanding, as I will detail elsewhere.
If this was a similar post about programming, it would not get upvoted here because more people would recognise it for what it is: a âMonads are Like Burritosâ post from a well-meaning but misguided beginner.
E.g:
> not so lucky and got a "ru" ending? check what vowel before the "ru". it it's one of -aru, -oru, -uru, then it's also a godan verb.
Wrong: ç œă (aoru) is ichidan: ç œăŁăăç œăăăăç œăăȘăăç œăăăç œăăă ăăă
ç œă is a godan verb, consistent with your example conjugations (if it was ichidan it would be ç œăăç œăă, etc)
I used to get these terms mixed up all the time because some textbooks use "Group 1" and "Group 2" to refer to these verbs, but Group 1 doesn't mean ichidan.
For all that I'm not totally sold on this article's idea of "stems" and "suffixes", I think it does a good job of avoiding this pitfall and correctly explaining the groups.
This kind of content is usually shared by people who are learning a language out of genuine interest for the first time. Most of the time it's Japanese because of the popularity manga and anime enjoy, and the challenge of learning a language that's so different from one's mother tongue. There are countless blog posts written by people to whom it "clicks" for the first time, and they excitedly run to their computer to share their novel experience. I don't see anything wrong with this, let them enjoy the moment. But if they stick to their learning routine, they will inevitably learn the truth that is that the only way to learn a language is to interact with it a lot through all possible channels - speaking, listening, reading, writing. Mnemonics may work for some time, but in the end one won't be able to actually use the language if they don't learn it intuitively. And there is also the fact that most of those people live in places where Japanese is not in everyday use, limiting their opportunities to practice it.
> There are lots of people in the comments somehow offended by the author's genuine excitement over the method that worked well enough for them that they wanted to share it.
Did it work for them though? They apparently never got past the basics. So IMO it's more likely the opposite; they've distracted themselves from getting on with learning.
Thanks! Iâd say that a big part of the motivation for me was to show that this piece is orthogonal to the rest of the language. You can sit down and understand how to conjugate almost any word to almost every suffix in the time it takes to read this. Yes â not fluently â and not âunderstandingâ the language â but itâs wild to me that you can do that at all! It wasnât obvious to me that this knowledge is orthogonal to everything else.
Thatâs what motivated me to write about it, really. In language courses all of this is often spread out over weeks or months. I thought it would be fun to write something that you can read in one evening and map out almost the entire system. With no prerequisites.
Because the whole article is built upon a straw man (it's not usually taught the way he claims) and the "method" is just a normal explanation (see this section on wikipedia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_conjugation#Verb_grou...
For me the biggest problem was never memorizing the suffixes but determining whether the verb belongs to group 1 or 2. While you can tell immediately that some verbs belong to group 1, the others (e.g. kaeru mentioned in the post) are not so easy (as far as I know there's no algorithm for that and you just need to memorize with every verb to which group it belongs).
> now let's try to apply the rules:
> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as ă on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi".
I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.
Many Japanese English speaksers instinctively pronounce si as shi. They say shistem for system, bashic for basic, shix for six, etc
Kunrei shiki was abandoned a few months ago.
Um... 話ăăŸă is the correct conjugation for 話ă, what am I missing here?
The author is using an anglicised romaji system and evidently thinking in English, so they think writing 話ăăŸă as "hanasimasu" is "wrong".
I feel like youâre going out of your way to misinterpret the article. As the article says below:
> this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
Then the article includes an exercise that verifies the readerâs understanding.
I also included a note:
> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders ă as "si", 〠as "tu", and 㥠as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
Where is the factual mistake here? âsiâ is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji, therefore itâs invalid.
"Factual mistake" is a bit harsh, but the missing piece is that there are multiple ways to romanise Japanese; all of them produce "valid Romaji" but only in the particular system being used. Si is how you write ă in romaji using the kunrei-shiki romanisation. In the Hepburn romanisation it's shi. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#Diffe... .
Kunrei has been deprecated, Hepburn is the official one even the government of Japan recommends these days and matches better the pronunciation of the language.
I see, maybe my use of âromajiâ is sloppy because I implied âHepburn romajiâ specifically because thatâs what I chose in the article. I do explicitly mention that other romanizations exist and that I chose not to use them â so Iâm not worried about misleading someone who reads the article. But on pedantic level I see why âsi doesnât existâ sounds overly broad.
I think also that anyone who's spoken Japanese for a while already has internalized that "si" === "shi" because there literally isn't the sound "si" in modern Japanese, as the other commenters mentioned it's often romanized both as "si" and "shi" in daily life, if you typed "si" into a keyboard it renders ă, it goes on. The original comment on this thread includes one such person who literally didn't follow why "si" is wrong, and I felt the same way too as a long-time Japanese learner. It's a very "copy paste Western language concepts onto Japanese" way of conceptualizing the language, which is IMO a great way to set oneself up for great struggles when trying to learn a language that is structurally different, because it's not the right mental model.
This is pedantic but you're thinking of "romanization", the act of transliterating Japanese with the Roman alphabet (romaji). There are different systems of romanization, most notably Hepburn and Kunrei. In Hepburn shi is correct, in Kunrei si is correct.
It sounds like you're saying "si" are not valid characters in the Roman alphabet.
Ok yea I see what youâre getting at â my terminology was overly narrow. By âromajiâ I specially meant âromanization Iâve chosen for this articleâ. I do offer an explicit note that other romanizations exist, but outside of that note, I tried to stay within a single self-consistent system, so this nuance was lost.
> I feel like youâre going out of your way to misinterpret the article.
Nope. You correct yourself after, sure, but what I wrote is how it came across at the time when reading.
> Where is the factual mistake here? âsiâ is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji
No, that's not what "romaji" means. If you mean Hepburn, say Hepburn. And if you don't know the difference, that's a sign to learn more before presuming to teach others.
hanasimasu = 話ăăŸă
I also still don't understand why the author thought this was wrong?
Because the author of the article hasnât internalized that si is pronounced âshiâ, is my guess.
The article literally says:
> there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. [âŠ] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. [âŠ] i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
Thatâs just false, âsiâ is in the hiragana table as ă. The romanization âsiâ is /si/ which is pronounced [Éi] (or [ÉiÌ„] or some other possibility). This is basic Japanese phonetics.
If you fix all the errors that are in the article, at best there is an argument buried here that Hepburn romanization should not be used to teach Japanese to English speakersâbut I think that point is really my own argument that Iâm making with the fragments of the article that make sense.
Romanization can be more consistent with Japanese phonetics or it can be more consistent with English phonetics, and the Hepburn romanization is more consistent with English phonetics, which is why itâs a good choice for English speakers that donât know Japanese, but a bad choice for English speakers who are trying to learn Japanese.
Okay, weâre fighting over definitions here. There is no âsiâ in Hepburn romanization. I am intentionally using Hepburn romanization in the article. Therefore, in my article âsiâ is a compile error.
You may argue with my choice, or maybe you can argue that referring to cells in Hiragana table solely by my chosen romanization is somehow bad, and I should instead be inconsistent and give the same mora two different romanizations within a single article. Is that what youâre suggesting?
First, As a basic part of Japanese language education, students are expected to be familiar with different romanization systems. If you ask a student where âsiâ is in the table, they should be able to find it. If a student says âitâs not in the tableâ then theyâve failed the lesson or there is something wrong with the teaching material.
Second: am I arguing that the choice of using Hepburn here is somehow bad? Yes, thatâs correct. I think Hepburn is a bad choice here. A good choice is Nihon-shiki. JSL romanization is also fine.
Hepburn is the official romanization chosen by the Japanese government (it's a relatively recent change), kunrei-shiki has been deprecated and all the signs etc are in the process of being converted to Hepburn.
Weâre talking about the same thing but you insist that there is only one angle under which things arenât confusing. I disagree. Thatâs fine. The two systems are isomorphic, and I genuinely believe that, given Iâve described every single caveat of Hepburn in the article, Iâve paid my dues for using it. YMMV. I even include the âfinding in the tableâ part.
I think I agree that Nihon-shiki and explaining it upfront wouldâve made the article more elegant. One constraint I wanted to hit is that a person should be able to read this article with zero knowledge of Japanese, and walk away with being able to conjugate almost every verb to every suffix correctly. This is more of a challenge to myself as a writer than any practical need but hope it shed some light on the choices and the framing. I liked Hepburn because itâs closer to how it sounds. You can imagine Iâm using IPA instead if you want.
The systems are obviously not isomorphicâJapanese kana are not entirely phonetic (they are just mostly so) and the different romanization systems choose differently whether to follow orthography or phonetics more closely.
> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible. Like, if I donât understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together donât produce the right Hepburn in the end?
YMMV indeed, but I think the lesson here is âthis is why you donât use Hepburn when youâre writing an article about Japanese verb conjugationsâ.
Hepburn does make sense for somebody with zero knowledge of Japanese but it just gets in the way when you are trying to explain how Japanese works. So lesson zero is âdonât rely on Hepburnâ and IMO if you are interested in pronunciation and listening you should be using audio as your primary source.
Iâm saying that Hepburn is isomorphic to Nihon-shiki since each is an encoding of kana. Each of them is a bijection to kana (actually thatâs wrong; see EDIT below), therefore thereâs a bijection between them. Obviously Iâm not saying that arbitrary latin characters are isomorphic to kana, that would make zero sense.
I sympathise with your point about the benefits of Nihon-shiki romanization here. It mightâve been a better choice for this article.
> I cannot wrap my head around how this line in the article could be defensible
I think the reader would just read the next section where I use your argument to critique my own approach? And then make up their own mind whether itâs defensible to do something in the article, to raise pros/cons for why I did it, and then to keep on with the choice.
I wanted to illustrate this confusing point, and thatâs how I chose to illustrate it. I think itâs confusing either way. I trust that a reader who actually wants to learn, and isnât just being a pedant, would carry away the right set of conclusions, and would understand the isomorphism (again â see EDIT below) after those two sections.
> Like, if I donât understand how Japanese is pronounced or written, and I just rely on Hepburn, I guess pasting these fragments of Hepburn together donât produce the right Hepburn in the end?
Yeah. So thatâs a learning opportunity that kana row shifting doesnât quite follow rules you might expect from many other languages. Maybe thatâs a clunky way to introduce it. I personally like this framing. As I noted somewhere else, you could imagine that Iâve chosen IPA notation instead.
â
EDIT: Actually wait, Hepburn is not bijective for zu and ji. I havenât thought about that. Itâs not relevant to any of the conjugations so it doesnât break the article, but that may be a good argument that itâs not worth the effort rescuing Hepburn.
> I think the reader would just read the next section where I use your argument to critique my own approach? And then make up their own mind whether itâs defensible to do something in the article, to raise pros/cons for why I did it, and then to keep on with the choice.
I think thatâs a long wait; I donât want to rely too heavily on analogies but it is like teaching somebody arithmetic roman numerals and then explaining in a parenthetical that there are other ways to do arithmetic (but not naming them). Maybe the reader can make up their own mindâbut I donât think the pros and cons are raised in the article, or if the are raised, I couldnât find it.
I donât want to pile on here but it sounds like you are, in this conversation, learning about why the different romanizations exist and what the pros and cons are. Or if you already knew, you are getting what they call an object lesson. (Like you notedâin Hepburn, ji and zu correspond to two different kana each.)
> As I noted somewhere else, you could imagine that Iâve chosen IPA notation instead.
This just resurfaces a similar problem with different symbolsâif you put your IPA notation in slashes // you get phonemes, which will get you something mostly equivalent to Kunrei-shiki romanization. If you put your IPA in brackets [] then you get something sort of equivalent to Hepburn (in that itâs designed to show pronunciation). Both choices will on some level obscure a regular pattern that could be revealed with kana or romaji. Orthography is funny like that; in both Japanese and English it can show the origin of words even when the pronunciation changes.
I think the other lesson here is that students will mostly learn morphophonology intuitively by absorbing examples with some light explanations of the rules, and if you overexplain the rules you end up with too much âscaffoldingâ which gets in the way. Like when people use mnemonics or try to memorize kanji by thinking pictorially.
I genuinely havenât thought about zu/ji here (conceded!) Itâs not relevant to conjugation though.
In general, I find your attitude a bit condescending. This is what I wrote about my choice:
> note i could also have used a different romanization that renders ă as "si", 〠as "tu", and 㥠as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head
My main mistake seems to be meaning â[Hepburn] romajiâ by writing âromajiâ. I was obviously aware of other systems because that is what the sentence says but I thought itâs acceptable to refer to Hepburn as just âromajiâ as a sort of the default one. Maybe thatâs wrong.
Other than this terminology nit, I think Iâve made myself quite clear there. I genuinely donât think itâs a big deal. Maybe I overestimate my readersâ intelligence but I donât find this difficult to live with at all once you get it.
Roman numerals is a funny parallel but it doesnât hold very well. The difficulty of using Hepburn is O(1) shortcut: for conjugation, you only have to ârememberâ three special cases and theyâre always applied just-in-time. Itâs just substitutions â and are arguably inherent phonetically. Arithmetic with Roman numerals requires many stacked adjustments where you have to match pairs of things. And lack of orders really screws with ability to do multiplication. This just isnât an intellectually honest comparison.
Re: your last point I actually kind of agree. Iâm that annoying student who likes to un-extrapolate backwards from examples to the rules, knowing which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, after which I can go back to examples. My article is for people like me. Maybe thereâs a few more of them.
Actually let me just try to explain my pedagogical approach and philosophy here. Maybe that makes it clearer.
I assume no prerequisites at first. So my reader has never seen a kana table and doesnât know which syllables exist.
I choose to teach conjugation first. Thatâs an unorthodox choice but I like it! Thatâs what I set out to do. So we get far enough until it breaks down. And it breaks down when a rule (which worked so far) doesnât help with âsâ because saying âsiâ would sound wrong.
Thatâs the moment I use to teach kana table and its importance. This âyou made a mistakeâ is a pedagogical vehicle for introducing kana rows. And we go over the exact ones that youâd make a mistake with. So each special case is walked through.
At this point we could discard Hepburn but I choose to keep going because if you know special cases, thereâs no issue. And at some point youâll learn kana anyway.
So thatâs how I chose to layer it. Maybe itâs a bit unholy but I like it. It is definitely self-consistent.
I understand why you wrote the article this way, I think the lesson here is âwe have learned why Japanese textbooks do not teach the content in this orderâ and there are a couple reasons why this order is not good:
1. It relies on people not understanding certain things. In general, you cannot expect people to have exactly the right misunderstanding necessary for a lesson.
2. Spending extra time with Hepburn reinforces it, and it shouldnât be reinforced.
I am in general extremely skeptical of lessons which try to engineer a way for the students to make mistakes. What I have seen in real classrooms and in informal teaching is that the mistakes are habit-forming and the outcomes of this kind of engineering are unpredictable.
Mistakes are appealing to the developers on HN because we understand things more by seeing them fail. But this does not mean that you can engineer somebody to experience the same moment of enlightenment that you did, because it requires constructing the same (incorrect) mental model that you had when you made that mistake that led to useful insight, and it both difficult and counterproductive to try and make that happen to students. Give people the best chances to learn by giving them the best chances to avoid mistakes, and the mistakes and insight will happen organically on their own, in unique ways for each student.
> In general, I find your attitude a bit condescending.
YeahâI can understand why Iâd come across as condescending. Thereâs a balance hereâI want to be clear when I say that I have problems with the article, but I donât want to be hurtful and I donât want to make criticisms that are not supported by the text.
Rather than defend my comments as âcorrectâ letâs say that I failed in my goals of not coming across as condescending. The reason I want to frame it this way is that similarly, I think the article failed in its goals as coming across (to me) as âlook at this neat thing about Japaneseâ.
It is just kind of the nature of written communication that it takes a lot of editing and polish to make it clear, correct, and concise. I had the good fortune to sign up for Japanese 101 when my professor was in the middle of writing a new Japanese textbookâit was pretty exciting, with the changing lesson plans, the flock of masterâs students hanging around, revisions and drafts to teaching materials, and those endless hours of classroom observation. The teachers occasionally gave us a âpeek behind the curtainâ and explained why they chose to teach things a certain way or another. Iâve rarely gotten that kind of explanation in any class that Iâve taken so I thought it was pretty special.
I donât expect you to put in the textbook-level of polish into your article but there is a kind of verbosity (the article is long, which makes it kind of hard to respond to because there is just so much to sift through), there are some problems with clarity (the issue of romanization and orthography is mixed in with the conjugation, and maybe it would be better to separate those issues) some problems with correctness (various) and some problems with completeness (the patterns omit some conjugations that I think you donât know, and I donât think they follow the pattern).
I have certainly put effort into articles that have gotten brutal negative feedback; I think it was right for me to write the article, and then feel like shit from the feedback, and then maybe retract and revise it. If there is one actual error here, a true error, I think the error is fighting out criticism in the HN comments.
> My main mistake seems to be meaning â[Hepburn] romajiâ by writing âromajiâ. I was obviously aware of other systems because that is what the sentence says but I thought itâs acceptable to refer to Hepburn as just âromajiâ as a sort of the default one.
"Romaji" does not (in English) mean "romanisation", as most people who've studied Japanese to at least beginner level know.
I've looked at over a dozen hiragana tables and they all use Hepburn romanization.
Obsessing over romanization, something that a student ought to outgrow, is a sure fire way for a student to get overwhelmed by irrelevant details that discourage learning. The hard part is putting in the work, not learning less than a dozen exceptions.
There's different romanization systems and English learners usually use Hepburn
I think itâs probably a mistake to use Hepburn if youâre learning Japanese, it kinda gets in the way. Either learn kana (which takes what, a week?) or use one of the other romanization systems which maps more cleanly to Japanese orthography
I've never understood how people can claim that learning kana takes a week. It clearly takes more time than that, considering how similar some of the symbols are and a lot of them only differ by double dashes or a stroke (think nu vs me, ne vs re, ro vs ru, chi vs sa, and so on). Then there are the combinations and even if you managed to learn hiragana, you still have to learn katakana.
Oh and I forgot, you have to actually learn how to listen, pronounce and speak them, not just learn a useless romanization mapping. I've heard way too many English speakers just say the romanization with English pronunciation. At that point their learning efforts turn into self sabotage.
In total that's definitively a month of effort, albeit spread out over the first year of learning.
Itâs a deliberate choice in the article. I cover every single caveat with it explicitly. I also mention this:
> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders ă as "si", 〠as "tu", and 㥠as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
That note isnât much to go on.
I think the choice is not a good one, whether it is deliberate or by accident, it is not a good choice either way. The main caveat to Hepburn is that itâs unsuitable for explaining how Japanese works and itâs unsuitable for learning Japaneseâso before you start working on verb conjugations, you pick up kana or one of the romanizations which is more aligned with Japanese.
The idea that you âshouldnât think in romajiâ is really âyou shouldnât think in Hepburnâ. This is an important distinction! Japanese has a relatively small inventory of phonemes, somewhere around 20 or 22 of them, and they map very neatly to the latin alphabet.
But the article doesnât make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.
IMO, this is kind of like seeing an article about how monads are burritos. Thinking that a monad is a burrito does not help me understand monads.
Nomu -> noma-nai / nomi-masu / nome-ru / nomo-u
Miru -> mi-nai / mi-masu / mire-ru / miyo-u
The ichidan and godan verbs are not assigned different categories because existing scholars of Japanese are just bad at explaining how they work, and you can still understand them just fine in romaji. I put the hyphens above to mark a place where you could think that the verb ends and the common conjugation forms end, and you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the âtricksââbut some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out (are you familiar with miru -> miyou conjugation, or miru -> mirareru?)
I concede that using Nihon-shiki maybe wouldâve been more elegant for what I tried to do in the article.
> But the article doesnât make this distinction, and seems to rely on confusion induced by the Hepburn romanization in order to make its points.
Not at all. I give it two sections and then we move on. It doesnât affect literally anything else on the page. You just learn to shift rows and move on. To make what points?
> you can see that the part on the left has somewhat different rules for ichidan and godan verbs, even when you apply the âtricksââbut some of these forms may be unfamiliar if you are are starting out
Iâm not quite sure what you mean to say in this part. I do cover -[r]eba and -[y]ou in the final section (âone more thingâ) which extends the model to clearly handle that disappearing consonant. I think -[r]eru fits in there the same way, just as -[r]u itself.
I think explaining it as mi + [y]ou = miyou, but nom_ + [y]ou = nomou is a clearer way to think about this. The rule is that the hole burns down the leading consonant (but takes the vowel).
The Japanese phonological system doesn't allow a /s/ sound to occur before the vowel /i/, the consonant must undergo palatalization and become /É/ (the IPA symbol for the Japanese sh-like sound). Because this is a regular sound rule, the native writing system doesn't have a way to distinguish the nonexistent */si/ sequence from the /Éi/ sequence that actually occurs, and this is the syllable that hiragana ă or katakana ă· indicate.
In the Hepburn romanization system, which generally tries to be transparent to speakers of English or other European languages, ă is romanized as _shi_, because this indicates to English speakers that the /s/ -> /É/ sound change happens. In the Kunrei-siki romanization system, which tries to be more faithful to the distinctions made in the Japanese phonological system, ă is romanized as _si_ to be consistent with the other possible syllables _sa_ _su_ _se_ _so_ that begin with the consonant /s/.
And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet is a sign that their command of Japanese isn't all that good yet.
> And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet
I donât understand where this misunderstanding about my article comes from. I am saying that the sound at the intersection of âsâ column and âiâ row is âshiâ. My article uses romaji so this is self-consistent. I am also mentioning that there is an alternative system that would romanize it as âsiâ but thatâs not the one Iâm using in my article.
> I am saying that the sound at the intersection of âsâ column and âiâ row is âshiâ.
That is exactly the problem. Japanese doesn't distinguish between 'shi' and si', so all you're really gaining by pointing that out is learning how to correctly romanize Japanese, in a single system. Instead of learning the language you're learning how to represent the language in a foreign way.
The rule 0 of learning a language is to get rid of the crutches as soon as possible. Use their native writing system (or if they're one of the latin alphabet users, use their pronunciation rule), learn words of the target language using said language, and learn how to formulate concepts with the language rather than translating it from what you already know. Crutches should only be used to get to this point and no more. If you do that, details like 'si' and 'shi' are not even worth mentioning. Romanization methods have their own goals, and rarely is it about facilitating language learning.
As someone that recently went through an introductory Japanese course in Japan, I don't find this much different than how it's taught. Or maybe I'm missing something?
It seems like the article is trying to make the case that in romaji, you can split the letters and isolate the vowel (e.g. the asterix in the article's conjugation).
But we were simply taught to change from the ă- row to the ă- row (u- row to i- row). I switched to Japanese to illustrate that you can make that statement even without romaji. In that case, it seems like basically the same thing?
As an anecdotal point, my class was mostly non-english speakers and I didn't find the above to be a sticking point for my classmates. The real sticking points were messing up the ichidan verb exceptions (ichidan verbs that look like godan) and conjugating the correct form for the different grammar points. Te and ta form were also a bit tricky. But the article doesn't seem to offer anything new to help there.
If youâre taught to shift rows, and you already comfortably think in kana â yes, I think thatâs equally good. Some of the materials Iâve tried learning from when I got started with the language didnât do that, and instead described each case as special. Thatâs what I didnât like.
That said, part of the challenge to myself with this article was to allow someone to learn Japanese conjugation even if they have zero knowledge of the language (even no kana). So thatâs another constraint influencing my choice. I also wanted to have the visual âgluingâ throughout the article as an aid for intuition, so thatâs another reason I used romaji.
I've found that any resource relying on any romaji after the first chapter or two is often a complete waste of time.
It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.
This is true, the only practical place where romaji might be used daily is for IME input.
This is why I think all the commenters obsessing over romaji just add fuel to the fire by being elitist over something that should only matter to an absolute beginner.
It's especially vain if the primary reason to choose one romanization strategy over another is to save keystrokes on a keyboard.
Iâve explicitly addressed this in the article. Cmd+F for a section called âwhy romaji is actually goodâ and then âwhy romaji is actually badâ. You may disagree with the approach, but I outlined my reasons for choosing it (as well as its downsides).
I'm saying I disagree.
It is always a crutch for the first year student or the barely passed second year student that never helps with real Japanese.
Writing out romaji in Japan is likely to confuse more than help someone else understand.
You glossed over my point. Iâm not using it as a âcrutchâ for reading. Iâm using it to have notation for the stem â the thing before -u. I could choose alternative notation with kana (e.g. just always using the -u ending, or the idea of variable stems like i-stem and a-stem) but then the visual âgluingâ wouldnât work. Which is the whole point of mental model Iâm communicating. Itâs fine if you donât find this mental model helpful but itâs the point of the article.
Iâll be honest that I also wanted (as a challenge) to write this article so that a person with zero Japanese knowledge would be able to correctly conjugate almost every word to every ending. This is more of a teaching drill for myself though but itâs another reason for the romaji choice.
The explanation made sense to me: romaji works well for vowel shifts (as the vowels aren't glued to consonants) while kana works well for consonant shifts (because the vowels are glued to consonants).
Latin text's smaller tokens/phonemes have advantages and disadvantages, but they are a convenient notation for getting the author's point across.
The difference in phonemes reminds me of how game designer Naramura came up with the (Spanish-sounding) name "La Mulana" for his game by spelling his name backwards in kana. In romaji it would have been "Arumaran" which is completely different (while in kanji it would have been "Muranara".)
> while in kanji it would have been "Muranara"
Not quite. If you change the order of some kanji, the general case is that the resulting text has no definite pronunciation. You definitely would not expect that the sounds assigned to the kanji in one ordering would be the same ones assigned in a new ordering.
This is a phenomenon the Japanese sometimes play with. In the novel Musashi, Musashi comes up with that name by reinterpreting the characters of his actual name (which, in the novel, is TakezĆ).
Agree. Especially how easy it is honestly to learn hiragana. You can practically learn it in a day and keep a table next to you to look up every time you forget one.
If you're at the point you're learning verbs you'd be mad not to know how to read some kana.
I explicitly address my reason for choosing it over kana in the article. If you disagree, please engage with the argument thatâs already there.
The benefit you give (be able to "cut" a kana in the middle) is really weak, I've never seen anyone being confused by that when learning in kana.
This is completely nullified by all the drawbacks of using romaji while learning and they're well known already.
The only reason to use romaji for Japanese grammar is to explain the concepts to someone who has no interest in learning the language, just for their general knowledge.
The comments to this article are another example of something I see so often in Japanese language learning dicussions I see online. It's always filled with debate, disagreement, arguements over incredible subtle things, and everyone trying to optimize the best method. It can be really discouraging space for early learners.
It's not discouraging at all. Japanese concepts do not have a 1-1 mapping with English concepts, so there is a lot of debate about how it can be taught. I find it fascinating.
Theorycrafting efficient ways of learning Japanese while being barely conversational yourself is a completely different hobby from actually learning Japanese (or actually studying the teaching of Japanese), and sadly in online spaces the former often swamps out discussion of the latter.
The online spaces can be really discouraging, trueâbut it can also be really discouraging to be in a classroom or in a foreign country, struggling to use a language you barely know. Meanwhile, there are also a lot of ways to spend effort trying to learn a language without gaining mastery. Truly frustrating.
If you want some decent level of fluency then there is something you have to do, which is to communicate with other people in context and with specific goals in mind (get information, give information, make a request, etc). Whatever you can do to arrange for that to happen is probably more valuable than anything you can do online or with books. I personally like to recommend finding classes at a local college.
If you canât get that, then I think the next best thing is reading and listening.
Drills are also necessary but you can easily fill your time with drills without advancing your ability to communicate or understand people.
There is plenty of research about what is / is not effective when it comes to learning languages so I encourage people to at least take a look at the results of that research rather than just go with whatever people recommend online (Iâm just some random person online, I may be no better than the next). AI tools reportedly have a positive effect but they are not nearly as good as human interaction.
Author here â itâs a really fun, elegant, and beautiful language. I highly recommend it if youâre interested. Maybe controversial but I think you can largely ignore the Japanese-learning community if/when the vibe isnât right.
Mostly it helps to find learning resources that gel with your style of learning, and if possible, a tutor so you have a roadmap and more motivation. I found mine on italki. I also find Claude very helpful for sentence drills based on words and grammar I know.
Japanese language learning environments really are ridiculously hostile and I've stopped engaging with them unless im searching for a specific resource.
I've dabbled a bit in Mandarin and while eventually i ended up liking Japanese more as a language, the Mandarin language learner community felt like such a warm bath in comparison. The people were friendly and welcoming and willing to help and genuinely excited to find more people wanting to learn the language.
> why romaji is actually good
It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
Mu, bu and nu also all obey the -nda transformation due to phonetics, and not due to how "if we just shuffle the letters around and presto! Nomu becomes nonda".
Japanese already has plenty of its own reading inconsistencies, so adding another layer on top isn't going to help you.
Finally, there's going to be so much kana in your every day life that learning conjugation in romaji is guaranteed to cripple your reading, because instead of recognizing kana (e.g. you see a billboard that says ăè¶ăéŁČăă æčăăăïŒ as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go) you've spent the first n hours on trying to "hack" the language instead of just learning it.
> It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu".
All of this is described just below, in the section called âwhy romaji is actually badâ, with these specific examples being tested.
> It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
This is also described further below in the post.
> as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go
I see âunderstanding the systemâ and âapplying it fluentlyâ as two separate activities. I find romaji more illustrative for the former because the system is phonetical on a sub-mora level. Whereas kana is more helpful for the latter. I donât assume my reader is an idiot, and so I assume that they would be able to pick the right tool for the job on their learning journey. The fluency always layers on separately anyway, understanding doesnât âhelpâ there. Itâs just that personally I find understanding a great motivator (and fallback) for developing fluency.
-u godan verbs historically ended in ă” /fu/ (and earlier /pu/), and were written that way until the 20th century kana reform. So the historical conjugation pattern of a verb like tamau was tamafa-/tamafi-/tamafu-/tamafe- + additional inflectional endings. The /f/ became a /w/ before /a/ but weakened and was lost entirely in other positions, leading to the modern pattern of tamau, tamaimasu, etc. but tamawanai.
Up until just last year "si" "ti' and "tu" were the proper official way to romanize "shi" "chi" and "tsu": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunrei-shiki
"Official" in only the strictest sense. Everyone has used Hepburn since forever, the government just got around to acknowledging that.
And thank the lord that the romanization of Japanese (with its few little quirks) is one of the simplest transliterations there is.
And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english. Complaining that there's no english equivalent of the russian (ĐČзглŃĐŽ / vzglyad)'s initial cluster would be similar in feel - no english words use it, so the romanization can be whatever you like, really.
> And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english.
Erm, wtf? The English "si" sound does exist and sounds different from ă. There is a reason people don't want to write Sinzyuku, and while I think they're making the wrong tradeoff, it is a tradeoff and should be acknowledged as such.
"As a result, the sequences [ti si di (d)zi] do not occur in native or Sino-Japanese vocabulary."[1] Unless I'm missing something, Japanese phonology doesn't include the sound english has as "si", only "shi"? I'm not a native speaker though, it's entirely possible that I am missing something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology
Ah, you mean those sounds don't exist in (standard) Japanese? I got confused by you talking about "the English equivalent".
Funny how some conjugated forms of verbs collide with dictionary forms of other verbs (esp. if we ignore pitch accent differences):
E.g. potential of èČ·ă (kau, to buy) is èČ·ăă (kaeru), which is spelled like ćž°ă (kaeru, to return home).
It reminds of you how "lay" is a verb (to put something into a flat resting position, but is also the past tense of "to lie" (take on a supine position).
Today, I lay bricks; yesterday I lay in bed all day.
Plus lie and lie are examples of how English verbs can be homonyms in dictionary form, but conjugate differently, something we see in Japanese (either actual homonyms or near homonyms modulo pitch accent).
I started to learn Japanese 30 years ago, and in my experience the people who try to be smart and build systems almost never get decent. Itâs procrastination while thinking theyâre actually productive.
To add insult to injury this article hasnât discovered anything new, makes it sound way more complicated than it is, and in the end still requires you to just remember which verbs are of the eru/iru group, and which are not (which was posed as a problem to solve in the intro).
Just make cards and mark the stem, learn it along with the verb. No need for heuristics. If you ever forget, youâre bound to remember the masu-form and can reverse engineer the stem from that 100%.
Similarly, when complaining about how you have to memorize a big table of verb conjugations in the intro, the author links to a table of... -ta forms, a verb form for which the author later concludes you just have to memorize a big table.
The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system that doesnât reduce further. I think thereâs still value in having a solid model for everything else. At least I personally found it valuable, which is why I thought to share it with people.
I'm not totally sure this "stems and suffixes" mental model really works well for everything else. Forms like the imperative (éŁăčă), volitional (éŁăčăă), provisional (éŁăčăă°), potential (éŁăčăăă), and causative (éŁăčăăă) aren't cleanly handled either -- they work similarly for godan verbs, but you have to add a different suffix for ichidan verbs.
It's definitely useful to understand how "chi" and "tsu" fit into the hiragana chart, and if your asterisk notation helps you remember which verbs are ichidan vs godan then that's great, but I'm not sure it's worth trying to unify -masu and -nai into one model.
> Forms like the imperative (éŁăčă), volitional (éŁăčăă), provisional (éŁăčăă°), potential (éŁăčăăă), and causative (éŁăčăăă) aren't cleanly handled either -- they work similarly for godan verbs, but you have to add a different suffix for ichidan verbs.
They are cleanly handled in the final section (âone more thingâ) that introduces a notion of disappearing consonant like -[r]u, -[r]eba and so on, and gives a rule for it. This is a perfect inversion of what happens with -(i)masu and friends. The hole in the stem accepts the leading vowel but burns down the leading consonant.
Itâs quite elegant.
"Disappearing consonant" doesn't work for the potential form, unless you expand the representation to allow writing -[rar]eru. (Edit: And I think imperative would require like "-[ro](e)".)
Which, like, is clean in the sense that Redux is technically Turing-complete (you can encompass _any_ difference between two strings by saying that one string uses the stuff in brackets and the other string uses the stuff in parentheses), but that doesn't make it a good idea.
Okay, that oneâs fair! I remember there was also some other one that had it split into two completely different suffixes.
My answer to this is that by the time youâre learning those, youâre already so fluent in conjugation that a couple of special cases will layer on fine. Itâs way better then you get in most languages. (And pedantically Iâd still say [] works for the cases above, as youâve shown.)
I honestly donât understand the cynicism here. If I could read this article when I started learning, it wouldâve saved me a ton of time. Thatâs why I wrote it. I hope itâll be useful to someone else but itâs fine if not. As an educator Iâm proud of how much it crams in thatâs usually spread over many weeks, and how the simple model almost perfectly generalizes. But yeah sure itâs making some unorthodox choices and leaves a couple of advanced cases within one indirection. Iâm still very happy with it.
Why would you expect the article where Iâm describing what worked for me to âdiscover something newâ? Iâm literally sharing the mental model that I personally found helpful. Thereâs nothing ânewâ in learning or teaching a language. But this is the most minimal model Iâve found useful, compared to others, and I wanted to share it with other people.
I think youâre taking a lot of stuff for granted. âJustâ do cards etc. Youâre using the word âstemâ but whatâs a stem? Why do we sometimes inject -i or -a (or -wa) there and sometimes we donât? You still have to learn that and understand that. Thatâs what Iâm describing in the article. If you already know stems and how they compose with suffixes, congratulations, you wonât find my article useful.
Honestly, you don't need to "learn" or "understand" much grammar explicitly. I think it definitely helps get you off your feet, as you can "decode" sentences if you remember grammar rules, but eventually the grammar has to be internalized anyway. This happens when you are repeatedly exposed to the same patterns in context. I don't know how English or Norwegian grammar works, and I'm fluent in those. I skipped grammar in Japanese and focused on reading, yet I can understand most things and I can tell when something sounds wrong.
The article could just be two words: ichidan, godan. Done.
One big change I had when learning Japanese was that someone introduced to me Cure Dolly videos on YouTube, and it has been an eye-opener: All these verb conjugations are actually attaching another verb to extend its meaning
"hanasimasu" is not exactly wrong; there is a romanization system in which "si" is how you write "shi".
If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language, it behooves you to adopt "si" and "ti", because they bring in a consistency needed by such a system to be complete.
> If you want to invent scheme for understanding conjugation which works by cracking the romanized versions of words to create a pseudo-stem that could not actually exist in spoken language
That's how all conjugation schemes work. There's nothing weird about this. Stems aren't supposed to exist in the spoken language. But they are observable in the spoken language.
Compare how a modern dictionary will give you ÏÎżÎčÎÏ, a full and fully-inflected word which doesn't actually exist in ancient Greek, as the first principle part of that verb. This is done because the stem of the verb is ÏÎżÎčΔ-, and the epsilon ending the stem can be easily observed by its effect on most of the conjugational endings. It doesn't happen to affect the first-person singular ending -Ï (to be precise, the contraction of Δ- with -Ï is -Ï), so the dictionary form is synthetic, chosen to be informative.
For anyone who is interested in learning Japanese, or looking for resources. I've compiled this "Awesome Japanese" repo.
https://github.com/yudataguy/Awesome-Japanese
Here's how I was taught verb conjugation.
First, we learnt verbs in the -masu form. Nomimasu, tabemasu and so on.
Then we learnt this song (to the tune of Clementine)
chi ri i tte mi ni bi nde kiite giite
It's a quick mneumonic to help you go from the polite verb to the "te-form" ending. I hummed it in my head while working out the conjugation before it became natural and "obvious".
Calling it concatenation is a little misleading.
Japanese is known as an agglutinative language [0], and how verbs are conjugated also has a lot to do with politeness, as well as local dialects. That's why you can turn on an anime and hardly understand it, even after a couple years of study.
I got to the third year college level in my own Japanese studies, and at that point, memorizing kanji was starting to compete with my computer science studies, so I had to drop it. I got to travel to Japan and live with host families (we kind of settled on a Japanese/English pidgin), so I don't regret the experience.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language
Itâs concatenation with the asterisk, and the asterisk is what we build throughout the article.
:(
Romaji are great, and in some ways more instructive because they reveal patterns which are otherwise a little hidden. You just have to realize that S+I is shi, T+U is tsu, etc. I donât want to get too deep into it but there is a regularity to the language, and rules, and different choices of writing system reveals different pieces of the puzzle.
Next, the conjugation itself. There are massive categories of conjugations missing! Like, how do you get from taberu / nomu in this system to tabereru / nomereru? It turns out that these ichidan and godan verbs actually do have some differences in conjugation. Whoâd have thought? (There is the -i stem, but there are other forms.)
Both of these things are described in the article. The first one is in âwhy romaji is actually badâ section, the second one is in âone more thingâ part at the very end.
Fascinating to hear non-tech insight from Dan, especially as a fellow (rookie) student of æ„æŹèȘ.
Fun, and a programmatic perspective. However, it can be too easy and fun to get super caught up in these details, if your goals are some level of fluency and ability to communicate/read. The majority of people that I know who have gained any level of fluency in Japanese as an adult mostly avoided stuff like this because (for many people; of course everybody is different) doing all of this mental math to dive down to the last detail was nowhere near as effective as some speaking and reading drills.
It is definitely well written and presented.
Maybe itâs not very clear but I donât suggest studying from articles like this alone. Obviously you need to do sentence drills and talk to a tutor or native speakers to have any chance of success. I still find documenting my mental model helpful because most articles Iâve seen before were not teaching it clearly enough for my taste.
I like to do deep dives like this not to memorise but to understand deeper layers, the spirit of the language, the way it moves, the way it unfolds.
By all means, it is fun to play with a language. And every person's brain works differently.
I like to use this metaphor, though. You're hiking a mountain, this journey to the "peak" is reaching some goal of fluency.
It's fun to stop and look at rocks, examining, comparing and whatnot. But it doesn't necessarily get you closer to the peak. I mean, it might, because you'll better understand your footing every-so-slightly. Not a perfect metaphor.
Thanks! Feels like the only person on this page who gets what I was going for.
I usually just consult my handy sheet of BNF rules while speaking Japanese.
If it's taking you this much effort to do the trivial conjugations (seriously, the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down, and falls back on "yeah, you just have to memorize the patterns" for ă/㊠forms), yeah, just memorise them. Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you; you actually just have to put the time and effort in.
Author here. Strong disagree.
I prefer having a system to simply memorizing. I donât know what you mean by âso much effortâ. I am literally just describing the system as it is brick by brick. If you see an opportunity to simplify, youâre welcome to provide a specific suggestion. I find this system rather elegant, and I tried to build it piece by piece because thatâs my preferred way both to learn and to teach.
>the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down
The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I donât consider it more âinterestingâ and Iâd argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise. So I didnât spend much time on te/ta-form. (That said, even for -te/ta form, I find it calming to think of -nda as a contraction of -nita, and so on, which AFAIK is in the ballpark of what historically happened.)
> Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you
I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if thereâs a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it. Even if thereâs a layer of memorization and repetition to achieve actual fluency. Japanese conjugation is a rare case where the system actually is very clear and methodical. The article is written for people like me who also prefer to know it. Thereâs literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I donât understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
> I donât know what you mean by âso much effortâ.
This is a pretty long blog post covering really not very much.
> The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I donât consider it more âinterestingâ and Iâd argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise.
It's not just te/ta, you don't mention anything other than the basic polite/casual, positive/negative, and desiderative. At the very end you point to conditional and causative but say you haven't studied them, and no mention at all of passive, imperative, causative passive, or volitional.
> I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if thereâs a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it.
And how's that working out for you?
> Thereâs literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I donât understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
I find it very presumptive to propose to "teach" what you haven't really learnt. How many people have successfully become remotely close to fluent following this approach? It's 0, right? What makes you think you're "teaching" rather than leading people astray?
Indeed, especially for a language with forms of verb as regular as in Japanese. The whole language has two and a half irregular verbs. Compare that to Spanish and realize how fortunate you are to study Japanese verbs.
this is quite intriguing, as a native speaker and someone with friends trying to learn Japanese, I always had a hard time explaining all the different patterns and just defaulted to "it just is". Will use this in the future!
Categorizing Japanese verbs as -ru or -u requires more context.
I prefer the term "group 2 verbs" to "-ru verbs." Group 2 verbs are verbs that end in -eru or -iru, not just -ru. Of course there are some exceptions, like kaeru, which ends in -eru but is actually a -u verb. Conjugation is easy: remove the final -ru and append -masu, -mashita, etc.
"Group 1 verbs" (again, -u verbs) are verbs that are not group 2 verbs. Conjugation is a bit more difficult because the -nu, -bu, -mu, and -u verbs have many suffixes. However, after memorizing these two (-nbmu and -u, because -nu, -bu, and -mu are almost the same), the rest are easy.
There are only two irregular verbs: kuru and suru. Just memorize them.
I learned Japanese by just memorizing. Once you have memorized enough verbs and their conjugations, you can figure out the conjugation of a new verb even if you don't understand how it works.
there are more irregular verbs than just kuru and suru. iku and aru are also irregular, for example.
Irregulars notwithstanding, the conjugation pattern is actually completely lossless if you just remember the imperative form (e.g. çă kiro, ćă kire) instead of the infinitive, which is lossy (e.g. çă kiru, ćă kiru). Then there's no need to have to remember, "oh... is this -iru verb group 1 or group 2?"
Theyâre sometimes called âsemi-irregularâ because they are mostly regular with, like, one deviation. The list is not long and it is quick to memorize.
Iku is kinda irregular but it's only itte and itta instead of ite/ita. Also aru/nai is more like antonyms rather than conjugation?
meh, language learning has an inconvenient truth: sometimes itâs just rote memorization. it's the reflexive belief that every human endeavor must have a hidden optimization waiting to be discovered. Language learning is one of those domains that stubbornly replies, "Cool flowchart. Now memorize 500 words and spend 200 hours listening."
Thereâs no clever engineer hack that replaces time spent with the language. and with regard to japanese, please stay away from romaji, unless you're still in beginner stage and typing things out to communicate words you already know the phonetics to.
I mean I think itâs both! As an author, I wrote this to settle my mental model. This doesnât mean I could use it during fast speech, but I find it calming to understand the actual linguistic system behind the tables. Especially when itâs so elegant.
The choice of romaji is deliberate for multiple reasons and is defended in the article (with counter-arguments for why itâs bad too).
Te-form mnemonic (sung to Ba Ba Black Sheep):
i chi ri tte
bi mi ni nde
ki ite
gi ite
shi shite
I learned this 35 years ago to the tune of Clementine, youre using black sheep, my spouse uses another tune, but what funny is I learned it not with the 'i' endings, but with the dictionary form (sometimes called base-3) 'u' forms.
u tsu ru tte bu mu nu nde ku ite, gu ite
without the shi shite as that had been learned well ahead of the lesson adding ta/te forms.
I just think it's interesting how readily a little ditty tune helps people with recall, regardless of the actual tune.