alt Hacker News> I much prefer how Japanese people actually teach verbs: 一段 (ichidan), literally "1-step"; 五段 (godan), literally "5 steps", plus a few exceptions sometimes called irregular verbs
This is literally what I teach in the article, including these translations. Quoting it:
> in ichidan ("one-row") verbs like taberu, the last syllable of the stem is fixed. it's always going to be be, no matter the suffix:
>
> (table)
>
> it stays on a single row in the hiragana table, hence "one-row".
>
>on the other hand, in godan ("five-row") verbs like nomu, the final syllable of the stem alternates between ma, mi, mu, me, and mo:
> (table)
> it spans all the five rows, which is why it's godan ("five-row"). the m* "wildcard" represents the entire ma/mi/mu/me/mo column.
You’re also mischaracterising my approach. I am not teaching to “think in English”. Quoting from the article:
> i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table. so this is a reminder to not think in romaji when you do calculations. when we conjugate godan verbs, we literally go up and down the column. (maybe all these textbooks that used hiragana had a point!)
If you have objections, please engage with the article’s actual content, not with what you assume it is based on a glance (“oh he’s using romaji, this is thinking in English”). I’m using romaji for specific reasons that are motivated and explained in text, and I show every single pitfall of that choice as well.
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Where does the commenter say it was only a glance? I share the feeling.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to make sense of something new using terms and concepts you already know and that click for you. We all do it, me included.
I was speaking more broadly about learning Japanese and what I see on HN. Every six months or so, somebody discovers a clever pattern in the Japanese language. It’s almost always related to something taught in the beginning, the N5 level. And that pattern seems to have been eluding rest of us.
Specifically about your post, I think there's a shorter and simpler explanation of the verbs. One good example: https://kellenok.github.io/cure-script/5-verb-groups-and-the...