danabramov

This seems like a culture clash. In programming blogging, it is completely fine to write blog posts about the mental model that works for you (as long as it doesn't contradict evidence) and then maybe it works for somebody else. The idea that I need to first get an approval from a commission of Serious Teachers That Verified Which Approaches Work Well For Learners Statistically is laughable to me.

I write for myself and for people like me, period. I do not claim this is useful to anyone but a tiny group. This tiny group is who it's written for. I explicitly say in the article that I struggled and this is what got me unstuck. If it isn't helpful, just close the tab.

To me, “this just works for me, personally” and “this my unorthodox method of teaching/explaining conjunctions in Japanese” is the same thing. It's just my style of writing. You can check some of my “proper” articles to see the pattern. Here I’m “teaching” basics of Lean: https://overreacted.io/the-math-is-haunted/. Here I’m “teaching” algebraic effects: https://overreacted.io/algebraic-effects-for-the-rest-of-us/. Here I'm “teaching” a particular React API: https://overreacted.io/a-complete-guide-to-useeffect/.

In all of those cases, my approach is to unroll my own mental model into the shortest topologically sorted path, and to share it with people in the form of a post. You could say that all of this is bullshit, maybe. From the past, I’ve gotten plenty of feedback that this approach has helped other people understand the things I’m explaining. So I have anecdotal evidence this is “teaching”, if you so insist on gatekeeping the term to the “proven” instances of someone else understanding it. My process here has been exactly the same. So yes, it’s both “sharing what works for me” and “my quirky take on it” and (I’m sorry) “how I teach this” because this is all the same thing to me. It’s not the same thing to you, and that’s fine, we just disagree on definitions.

I also don’t think it’s fair to say that “people” “rejected” my “teaching” here and therefore it’s bad. There's some positive comments here, I’ve seen positive comments on other platforms. Quoting a few of them: “I thought this was a great post, thank you for writing it :)”, “I'm not learning Japanese but I enjoyed reading this nonetheless”, “this is cool”, “Really good read that anyone interested should check out”, “This was VERY helpful, thank you! Hoping for more articles along the same lines of "engineer deconstructs a language and makes it more approachable", esp for Japanese.”. Do these responses satisfy your definition? Do I need to carry them around and present them to HN readers? This is extremely silly. The vast majority of the reaction here has been from people who already know the topic and have strong opinions about how it should be taught which is clearly not the audience for the article. If you want to run an experiment on a clean group of people, go ahead and tell me the results. I just wrote a post into the void. That’s what I do when I learn things.

I still find the way you talk “(people mistaking your personal experience for something else)” — presumably still banging on the “this is not good teaching” drum — very condescending. As I find most of this thread.

The conclusion I am drawing from this is that I simply do not belong in the English-speaking Japanese-learning community. I am clearly breaking some kind of unspoken norms around what is appropriate to consider “teaching”, who is allowed to “teach” without being sneered at, how modestly one needs to talk about own writing, and so on. I do not abide by these norms, and have very little desire to engage with this subculture. I will likely continue writing about my experience of learning Japanese, and will continue considering it “teaching” because I know it will reach some people like me. I don’t know if I’ll have the restraint to stay away from these discussions, but this is probably the most unpleasant cloud of online interaction I’ve had for months. I feel upset, not in the sense that I expected praise, but at the sheer tone of this discussion and at the attempts to put me in my place, so to speak. No thank you.

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

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

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

I'm not saying that I wrote this article for everyone. I wrote it for me and people like me. Specifically, for people who appreciate the rigorous-and-ridiculous — like teaching from the linguistical perspective while using romaji.

It's the same approach that my "Just JavaScript" course uses — it's 100% by the spec, but I'm using unconventional metaphors (like "wires" for variables instead of "boxes"). I take pride in making rigorous explanations approachable by slicing the explanation differently.

This is not for everyone. But it's also not a reason to say this shouldn't be written.

Fine, it's too verbose for you. I like this pacing and level of verbosity for my own learning. I wrote it for people like me.

>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 haven't studied them (as in "what they mean") but I've gone through all tables of "how they attach" as part of researching the article. Let's catalogue them:

- Conditional and casuative: Fully covered by the article's last section.

- Volitional: Same pattern. In article's notation, it's -[y]ou.

- Passive: Same pattern. In article's notation, it's -[r]areru.

- Causative passive: Same pattern. In article's notation, -[s]aserareru. (I guess there's a special case there for when it contracts.)

- Imperative: Genuinely two cases that IMO are easier to teach separately.

If something's actually wrong, please correct it! I think the article gives a genuinely good scaffolding. By the time you get to these advanced cases, you're comfortable enough with the base model to split them up.

>And how's that working out for you?

Can you stop with your condescending sneering? It's working out well for me.

>I find it very presumptive to propose to "teach" what you haven't really learnt.

I think the article is rigorous in the scope it tackles. If it's not, you would have pointed out the mistakes by now. I also think a beginner has full license to teach if they stay rigorous. It's just a market of approaches.

I never claimed it's representative of anything. I said this is the explanation I wish I (me, personally!) were given, and I wrote it for people like me. I appreciate unorthodox explanations as a genre. As long as they're rigorously correct (again, you're welcome to point out factual mistakes), I like experiments like "learn a non-trivial part of the language with no prerequisites as a syntactic transformation in one evening". For many languages, including my native language, this is literally impossible! But for Japanese, it works. Maybe that sort of explanation is not to your taste, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve being written. The rest of your comment reads kinda ad hominem.

From what I can tell, my engineering-brained explanation is consistent with how a linguist would explain it (aside from choices in presentation like romaji). That's good enough for me.

The conceit of the article is that it doesn’t teach any meanings, it just teaches “how to append a suffix to a stem”. If this much is obvious to you, that’s fine, the article isn’t useful to you. It was difficult for me to understand ichidan/godan.

The article does not attempt to explain how to pick the suffix or what those suffixes mean.

So, on verbosity: that’s a stylistic choice. Not for everyone. For romanization: point taken and I agree frontloading it would’ve been more elegant. Though I kind of don’t like that it sounds wrong for an unprepared speaker.

For correctness: please provide specific issues. I’ll try to fix them. This is the part I actually care about.

For completeness: yes, some things I put out of scope break the pattern (or rather extend it — the mechanism of concatenation is the same but it actually may be easier to hard-split it by godan/ichidan). I genuinely think that by the point you learn those, you don’t need the scaffolding anyway, and the model has done its job.

I don’t feel like shit from the feedback. This is not my first rodeo. Where I have correctness issues, I would like them pointed out so I can fix. The handwringing about it being a weird way to teach — not so much. I know it’s weird; I wrote it because that’s what worked for me.

And fighting out the criticism in HN comments is half of the fun, isn’t it? :)

Again, the conceit of the article is you can learn almost the entire conjugation system in a single evening with no prior knowledge of the language. I invite you to step back for a moment, to accept that conceit as valid, and then to judge the article based on that conceit. For a serious learner, think of it as a fever dream that helps the concepts click next time you see them “properly”. For a tinkerer, think of it as a spark that gets you curious about the language.

I’ve found this lesson difficult to digest when I tried her approach. It’s actually where I fell off and lost the interest the first time I tried to learn the language.

The comparable lesson is primarily https://kellenok.github.io/cure-script/7-5-conjugation.html, not the one you quoted. I prefer teaching it before the -te form because it’s more orderly.

If we reorder these two lessons and rely on romaji over kana, you basically get my approach. I found it helpful so I wrote it down.

As for “correcting” myself, yes, I expect the reader invested in arguing online to also be able to follow more than a single paragraph of text. I think it’s fine that you stumbled there as that paragraph wasn’t for you. I don’t think I’ve hurt your understanding of Japanese this way.

The only people confused by that paragraph are people who already learned kana or correct pronunciation (or both). That paragraph isn’t for them.

Then the grandparent says something I agree with (don’t force the language into another language) but I don’t think it’s a fair description of what I’m doing. It sure looks like that’s what I’m doing, but I strongly believe that learning conjugation is primarily phonetical (it’s about how it sounds, not kana itself) and therefore romaji is just a better pedagogical choice for someone not already fluent with kana. And no, I don’t buy that you have to put being fluent in kana as a prerequisite. The whole conceit of the article is basically that you can learn almost the entire conjugation system in one evening with zero prior knowledge of the language. That alone justifies the small shortcut I took to get there.

I strongly suspect that if I were using Kunrei-shiki, there would be just as many comments here saying my article is wrong because “si” is pronounced closer to English “shi”, but my article makes it seem like it doesn’t — so this is why you should learn kana bla bla bla.

I assume my reader (1) has zero prerequisites and (2) wants words to sound correctly while seeing them the first time. Those are the constraints that motivated my approach. You could argue that it’s a strange set of constraints to pick when teaching but I wanted it to be fun.