> What could kanji possibly have to do with this? We're discussing a thing rooted in phonetics.
Your system is using a limited model that explains some things, but doesn’t explain many others. You need the kanji to see the entire elephant.
Obviously linguistics are post hoc explanations of evolved phenomena and never precisely categorize everything, but there’s a more complete system here. It’s best to start learning it early, instead of relying on the crutch of romaji.
> The verb stem often includes kana in addition to kanji (e.g. 食べ). There's nothing special here about kanji at all.
The point was that there’s a clear stem. For godan verbs, the stem is nearly always the kanji. Sometimes, there are only kana (びびる), typically because the kanji is complex. A few times, there are auxiliary kana (e.g. 変わる). For a beginner, this is not important. You’re also mixing ichidan verbs (食べる) where this is the common case (kana from the i or e sounds), with godan verbs, where it is not. Understanding this fact, alone, almost eliminates the need to memorize which verbs are ichidan.
With relatively rare exceptions, the ichidan verb stem contains kana, and the godan verb does not. The major exception class to this for godan verbs is the ~まる intransitive verbs, where the ま/わ remains part of the stem (変わる、閉まる、泊まる、etc). Otherwise, it’s weird stuff like adjectives turned verbs or slang.
Just knowing this gives you a linguistic intuition for identifying and choosing intransitive verbs!
> However, since I assume the reader might not want to constantly look at the kana table,
They don’t need to. They just need to memorize the kana. People keep telling you this across this thread.
Learn the kana, and these conjugation rules become so trivial that you barely even need to “memorize” anything.
> I focus on the phonetic intuition. And the phonetic intuition is trivially explained with romaji, which is why I use them.
Phonetic intuition is good. Doing it via romaji is fine for absolute beginners, but rapidly becomes a hindrance.
