This is not true. I regularly get HN front page hits, and still use em dashes. Nobody accuses me of AI writing. Writing with em dashes is not a problem if you have something to say.
In practice, "what's actually best for the community" (growing a community of engaged engineers who feel listened to and who understand what you're doing) is not necessarily easy to show by metrics. I think the author is making a subtler point that, even if you don't hate DevRel work, the most useful kind of work is often unappreciated or devalued by decision makers.
>You claim that only 2 groups are taught when 3 get taught.
I skipped the handful of exceptions because they have no rules associated with them, you just have to memorize them. Yes, it would be 3 if I counted exceptions. I am aware that they exist; you can check their list at the end of my post.
>You claim that you are given arbitrary tables to memorize, but it's usually explained to foreigners that you replace the last romaji to i when conjugating the verb into -masu form.
I must have been unlucky. I don't remember what resource I was using but it was primarily teaching with a separate table per suffix. Maybe the pattern was called out but I missed it due to feeling overwhelmed with the tables.
>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.
That's fair — if most people don't stumble here because this is clearly explained, that's good, and it means I've overstated the "usually taught". I still find that I prefer the specific style of explanation where we consider the corresponding vowel a part of the suffix, like -(i)masu or -(a)nai, which is how some linguists view it. That is another part of the motivation for writing the article.
I wasn't aware that this community gatekeeps the word "teach" to exclude personal blog posts. I have no desire to participate in this community anymore, but you're welcome to mentally substitute it with some other word.
Frankly, this thread was kind of wild, and it really got to me. It's not my first rodeo on HN, but the amount of wilful misunderstanding, weaponized debate devices, and manipulative grandstanding was off the charts compared to anything I've ever received in response to articles about programming. I'm still not sure what to attribute this to, and it will likely torture me for some more time.
I mention this at the end of the article, but the paper that inspired me is "No consonant-final stems in Japanese verb morphology" (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2010.03.026). It uses a different notation but it also considers the suffixes to be -(i)masu, -(a)nai, and so on, and specifies rules for how empty-ish slots concatenate. Maybe you'll be able to understand it better than I did! I found it very interesting but dense.
Is it to not write at all about what works for me? Is it to change what I write into the “accepted” approach and away from what I actually wanted to write? Is it to present my writing differently?
What’s the actual thing that you think would make people in this thread happy (or maybe just you for a start). Like outcome-wise. Next time I write, I do… what?
If it’s to use kana in an article like this, it’s kind of like if I painted a picture of a cat and everyone said they would rather see a dog. OK but that’s not what I was painting? I set it as a constraint for myself to not use kana in the article. It would be a completely different article if it used kana, and that article wouldn’t be worth writing to me.
I shared what works for me, not what I’m recommending for everyone else. So what is the advice? Maybe it’s not to write at all? Some secret third thing?
That seems like the best diagnosis so far for what’s happening in the thread and gives me some peace. I guess it also means I’ll try to keep my future explanations to myself because intersecting with a community with these norms is highly unpleasant. I wouldn’t say I regret writing this post, but this whole discussion killed my joy about sharing further on this topic.
I feel like there’s some kind of miscommunication, and I can’t bridge it, which is driving me a little crazy. I genuinely don’t understand why it’s bad that I wrote something for people who don’t want to depend on fluently reading kana for learning conjugation rules. I genuinely do not see the connection between the two — I don’t think there’s anything “simpler” in seeing how む becomes んだ than in how m_ + ita collapses into nda. It’s literally the same thing. There is no added clarity by using kana. I understand you’re “supposed” to learn it first and so on, but it does not actually aid the process of learning the specific things covered in the post. You mention identification of stems from kanji but this is not the thing I am teaching in the post? It’s about the rewrite rules once you know the stem, not stem detection.
The main thing I don’t get though is… I never claimed my post will be useful to “most people”. Where did you take that claim? Why is everyone assigning that claim to me and then refuting it? I repeatedly said many times in the thread that I don’t expect this to be helpful to anyone except people like me — and everyone is arguing that no, you should do it the other way around. Where is this assumption coming from?
Ah, I see what you mean. For me personally, knowing the shape of the system underneath has a sort of calming effect because I have a sense of the upper bound of how annoying it will be to learn by osmosis. And it's also nice to have a fallback for when I have a cache miss and need to really think through saying something.
Misleading means it leads to a wrong conclusion somewhere. Please demonstrate which wrong conclusion my article is leading to.
>and that's because of the dependence on romaji / transliteration
There is no "dependence" on transliteration per se. I use it as a visual shortcut for moving along the kana row, as I show in the middle of the post using the table. For all the examples we're looking at, the relationship between the mora and the corresponding romaji version is bijective — so there is literally no difference except the notation. I wanted the article to be accessible to someone who's not fluent in kana (and in fact to someone with zero knowledge of Japanese), hence the choice of notation.
>First, there is a clear stem (飲＊), but you just don't know that yet, because you haven't learned kanji
What could kanji possibly have to do with this? We're discussing a thing rooted in phonetics. The verb stem often includes kana in addition to kanji (e.g. 食べ). There's nothing special here about kanji at all.
>To wit: a godan verb [2] shifts from the "u" sound [...] to the "i" sound in the same column of the kana table [...] Then, for casual negative conjugations, you shift to the "a" sound in the same column
Sure, and that's exactly what I'm describing in the article. Why do you need to pretend I'm describing something different? There's even a place in the article where we use the kana table for that. However, since I assume the reader might not want to constantly look at the kana table, I focus on the phonetic intuition. And the phonetic intuition is trivially explained with romaji, which is why I use them.
Intuitively I suspect that you severely underestimate how many people give up on the language somewhere in the middle of the process of learning this "basic part" in the traditional way. My aim was to show to this group that you can actually understand the entire mechanic in one evening with zero prerequisites.
> have some ideas about what works for language learners that is not expressed by language learners experts.
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.
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.