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").
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 “Monads are Like Burritos” post from a well-meaning but misguided beginner.
Personally, as a beginner/early intermediate learner, what I have found works is just to allow my brain to learn this over time by reading and understanding more an more sentences. I used Genki and am aware that it thought this badly. But it was in the 3rd chapter and by the time I reached the 6th chapter I had gotten an intuitive idea anyway (とている just sounded wrong and I couldn't explain why). And I wasn't doing much output anyway so it didn't matter that I maybe confused a couple of verb endings as I recited the 2nd writing exercise og the 5th chapter of my textbook.
> 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: 煽る (aoru) is ichidan: 煽った、煽りたい、煽らない、煽ろう、煽られる 。。。
A crutch can be cast away gradually.
Finnish has two verbs, ottaa "take" and ostaa "buy". As a n00b I confused them all the time. So I decided that the "s" in ostaa was a dollar sign, and I used that quickly in conversation to select the right verb. And as I got quicker at it, it became "intuitive". I threw down my crutch.
I'm learning Turkish right now for example, and the dative forms for me/you (bana/sana) perfectly fit the accusative conjugation pattern in my native Polish. So my mnemonic is explicitly "the opposite of what you feel it is".
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_conjugation#Verb_grou...
So you agree my explanation is correct (but unnecessarily longwinded and builds a strawman)? I’ll take that.
So in essence this article boils down to someone claiming that the usual explanation is confusing and then their own system turns out to be equivalent to the usual way it is explained.
And based off your comment here the reason behind doing this may be you extrapolating how you first learned it to how people usually learn it.
I agree. I had plenty of strange abstractions and crutches when starting out learning Japanese, and starting in romaji was absolutely fine. While the post wouldn't benefit me now, starting out any useful mental shortcuts to producing Japanese would have been most welcome.
That’s 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.
