If it's taking you this much effort to do the trivial conjugations (seriously, the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down, and falls back on "yeah, you just have to memorize the patterns" for た/て forms), yeah, just memorise them. Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you; you actually just have to put the time and effort in.
I prefer having a system to simply memorizing. I don’t know what you mean by “so much effort”. I am literally just describing the system as it is brick by brick. If you see an opportunity to simplify, you’re welcome to provide a specific suggestion. I find this system rather elegant, and I tried to build it piece by piece because that’s my preferred way both to learn and to teach.
>the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down
The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I don’t consider it more “interesting” and I’d argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise. So I didn’t spend much time on te/ta-form.
> Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you
I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if there’s a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it. Even if there’s a layer of memorization and repetition to achieve actual fluency. Japanese conjugation is a rare case where the system actually is very clear and methodical. The article is written for people like me who also prefer to know it. There’s literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I don’t understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
Indeed, especially for a language with forms of verb as regular as in Japanese. The whole language has two and a half irregular verbs. Compare that to Spanish and realize how fortunate you are to study Japanese verbs.
I've found that any resource relying on any romaji after the first chapter or two is often a complete waste of time.
It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.
I’ve explicitly addressed this in the article. Cmd+F for a section called “why romaji is actually good” and then “why romaji is actually bad”. You may disagree with the approach, but I outlined my reasons for choosing it (as well as its downsides).
Agree. Especially how easy it is honestly to learn hiragana. You can practically learn it in a day and keep a table next to you to look up every time you forget one.
If you're at the point you're learning verbs you'd be mad not to know how to read some kana.
I started to learn Japanese 30 years ago, and in my experience the people who try to be smart and build systems almost never get decent. It’s procrastination while thinking they’re actually productive.
To add insult to injury this article hasn’t discovered anything new, makes it sound way more complicated than it is, and in the end still requires you to just remember which verbs are of the eru/iru group, and which are not (which was posed as a problem to solve in the intro).
Just make cards and mark the stem, learn it along with the verb. No need for heuristics. If you ever forget, you’re bound to remember the masu-form and can reverse engineer the stem from that 100%.
Why would you expect the article where I’m describing what worked for me to “discover something new”? I’m literally sharing the mental model that I personally found helpful. There’s nothing “new” in learning or teaching a language. But this is the most minimal model I’ve found useful, compared to others, and I wanted to share it with other people.
Similarly, when complaining about how you have to memorize a big table of verb conjugations in the intro, the author links to a table of... -ta forms, a verb form for which the author later concludes you just have to memorize a big table.
I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as し on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi".
I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.
I feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article. As the article says below:
this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
Then the article includes an exercise that verifies the reader’s understanding.
I also included a note:
> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji, therefore it’s invalid.
> there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. […] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. […] i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
I think it’s probably a mistake to use Hepburn if you’re learning Japanese, it kinda gets in the way. Either learn kana (which takes what, a week?) or use one of the other romanization systems which maps more cleanly to Japanese orthography
The Japanese phonological system doesn't allow a /s/ sound to occur before the vowel /i/, the consonant must undergo palatalization and become /ɕ/ (the IPA symbol for the Japanese sh-like sound). Because this is a regular sound rule, the native writing system doesn't have a way to distinguish the nonexistent */si/ sequence from the /ɕi/ sequence that actually occurs, and this is the syllable that hiragana し or katakana シ indicate.
In the Hepburn romanization system, which generally tries to be transparent to speakers of English or other European languages, し is romanized as _shi_, because this indicates to English speakers that the /s/ -> /ɕ/ sound change happens. In the Kunrei-siki romanization system, which tries to be more faithful to the distinctions made in the Japanese phonological system, し is romanized as _si_ to be consistent with the other possible syllables _sa_ _su_ _se_ _so_ that begin with the consonant /s/.
And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet is a sign that their command of Japanese isn't all that good yet.
> And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet
I don’t understand where this misunderstanding about my article comes from. I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”. My article uses romaji so this is self-consistent. I am also mentioning that there is an alternative system that would romanize it as “si” but that’s not the one I’m using in my article.
It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
Mu, bu and nu also all obey the -nda transformation due to phonetics, and not due to how "if we just shuffle the letters around and presto! Nomu becomes nonda".
Japanese already has plenty of its own reading inconsistencies, so adding another layer on top isn't going to help you.
Finally, there's going to be so much kana in your every day life that learning conjugation in romaji is guaranteed to cripple your reading, because instead of recognizing kana (e.g. you see a billboard that says お茶を飲んだ方がいい！ as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go) you've spent the first n hours on trying to "hack" the language instead of just learning it.
-u godan verbs historically ended in ふ /fu/ (and earlier /pu/), and were written that way until the 20th century kana reform. So the historical conjugation pattern of a verb like tamau was tamafa-/tamafi-/tamafu-/tamafe- + additional inflectional endings. The /f/ became a /w/ before /a/ but weakened and was lost entirely in other positions, leading to the modern pattern of tamau, tamaimasu, etc. but tamawanai.
As someone that recently went through an introductory Japanese course in Japan, I don't find this much different than how it's taught. Or maybe I'm missing something?
It seems like the article is trying to make the case that in romaji, you can split the letters and isolate the vowel (e.g. the asterix in the article's conjugation).
But we were simply taught to change from the う- row to the い- row (u- row to i- row). I switched to Japanese to illustrate that you can make that statement even without romaji. In that case, it seems like basically the same thing?
As an anecdotal point, my class was mostly non-english speakers and I didn't find the above to be a sticking point for my classmates. The real sticking points were messing up the ichidan verb exceptions (ichidan verbs that look like godan) and conjugating the correct form for the different grammar points. Te and ta form were also a bit tricky. But the article doesn't seem to offer anything new to help there.
And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english. Complaining that there's no english equivalent of the russian (взгляд / vzglyad)'s initial cluster would be similar in feel - no english words use it, so the romanization can be whatever you like, really.
One big change I had when learning Japanese was that someone introduced to me Cure Dolly videos on YouTube, and it has been an eye-opener: All these verb conjugations are actually attaching another verb to extend its meaning
Japanese is known as an agglutinative language [0], and how verbs are conjugated also has a lot to do with politeness, as well as local dialects. That's why you can turn on an anime and hardly understand it, even after a couple years of study.
I got to the third year college level in my own Japanese studies, and at that point, memorizing kanji was starting to compete with my computer science studies, so I had to drop it. I got to travel to Japan and live with host families (we kind of settled on a Japanese/English pidgin), so I don't regret the experience.
First, we learnt verbs in the -masu form. Nomimasu, tabemasu and so on.
Then we learnt this song (to the tune of Clementine)
chi ri i tte
mi ni bi nde
kiite
giite
It's a quick mneumonic to help you go from the polite verb to the "te-form" ending. I hummed it in my head while working out the conjugation before it became natural and "obvious".
Fun, and a programmatic perspective. However, it can be too easy and fun to get super caught up in these details, if your goals are some level of fluency and ability to communicate/read. The majority of people that I know who have gained any level of fluency in Japanese as an adult mostly avoided stuff like this because (for many people; of course everybody is different) doing all of this mental math to dive down to the last detail was nowhere near as effective as some speaking and reading drills.
Romaji are great, and in some ways more instructive because they reveal patterns which are otherwise a little hidden. You just have to realize that S+I is shi, T+U is tsu, etc. I don’t want to get too deep into it but there is a regularity to the language, and rules, and different choices of writing system reveals different pieces of the puzzle.
Next, the conjugation itself. There are massive categories of conjugations missing! Like, how do you get from taberu / nomu in this system to tabereru / nomereru? It turns out that these ichidan and godan verbs actually do have some differences in conjugation. Who’d have thought? (There is the -i stem, but there are other forms.)
this is quite intriguing, as a native speaker and someone with friends trying to learn Japanese, I always had a hard time explaining all the different patterns and just defaulted to "it just is". Will use this in the future!
meh, language learning has an inconvenient truth: sometimes it’s just rote memorization. it's the reflexive belief that every human endeavor must have a hidden optimization waiting to be discovered. Language learning is one of those domains that stubbornly replies, "Cool flowchart. Now memorize 500 words and spend 200 hours listening."
There’s no clever engineer hack that replaces time spent with the language. and with regard to japanese, please stay away from romaji, unless you're still in beginner stage and typing things out to communicate words you already know the phonetics to.
Categorizing Japanese verbs as -ru or -u requires more context.
I prefer the term "group 2 verbs" to "-ru verbs." Group 2 verbs are verbs that end in -eru or -iru, not just -ru. Of course there are some exceptions, like kaeru, which ends in -eru but is actually a -u verb. Conjugation is easy: remove the final -ru and append -masu, -mashita, etc.
"Group 1 verbs" (again, -u verbs) are verbs that are not group 2 verbs. Conjugation is a bit more difficult because the -nu, -bu, -mu, and -u verbs have many suffixes. However, after memorizing these two (-nbmu and -u, because -nu, -bu, and -mu are almost the same), the rest are easy.
There are only two irregular verbs: kuru and suru. Just memorize them.
I learned Japanese by just memorizing. Once you have memorized enough verbs and their conjugations, you can figure out the conjugation of a new verb even if you don't understand how it works.
there are more irregular verbs than just kuru and suru. iku and aru are also irregular, for example.
Irregulars notwithstanding, the conjugation pattern is actually completely lossless if you just remember the imperative form (e.g. 着ろ kiro, 切れ kire) instead of the infinitive, which is lossy (e.g. 着る kiru, 切る kiru). Then there's no need to have to remember, "oh... is this -iru verb group 1 or group 2?"
If it's taking you this much effort to do the trivial conjugations (seriously, the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down, and falls back on "yeah, you just have to memorize the patterns" for た/て forms), yeah, just memorise them. Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you; you actually just have to put the time and effort in.
Author here. Strong disagree.
I prefer having a system to simply memorizing. I don’t know what you mean by “so much effort”. I am literally just describing the system as it is brick by brick. If you see an opportunity to simplify, you’re welcome to provide a specific suggestion. I find this system rather elegant, and I tried to build it piece by piece because that’s my preferred way both to learn and to teach.
>the whole page barely mentions the interesting ones 80% of the way down
The te/ta-form is genuinely a separate system linguistically with its own heritage. So it makes sense to look at it separately. I don’t consider it more “interesting” and I’d argue getting the details right with other forms is much more useful coverage-wise. So I didn’t spend much time on te/ta-form.
> Language learning and exercise are the two things where I've found the programmer's instinct to "work smarter, not harder" works against you
I agree you need to put time to practice and all that. But if there’s a genuinely simple system underneath, I always prefer to see it. Even if there’s a layer of memorization and repetition to achieve actual fluency. Japanese conjugation is a rare case where the system actually is very clear and methodical. The article is written for people like me who also prefer to know it. There’s literally thousands of resources that teach it your preferred way, so I don’t understand the impulse to complain about someone teaching it differently for a change.
Indeed, especially for a language with forms of verb as regular as in Japanese. The whole language has two and a half irregular verbs. Compare that to Spanish and realize how fortunate you are to study Japanese verbs.
I've found that any resource relying on any romaji after the first chapter or two is often a complete waste of time.
It slows down beginners needing to make the hard jump, since romaji is never used except for signs in real life, and it just becomes a distraction to the material for anyone who is not a complete beginner. Furigana is helpful to the intermediate learner, romaji just becomes harder to read at that point.
I’ve explicitly addressed this in the article. Cmd+F for a section called “why romaji is actually good” and then “why romaji is actually bad”. You may disagree with the approach, but I outlined my reasons for choosing it (as well as its downsides).
I'm saying I disagree.
It is always a crutch for the first year student or the barely passed second year student that never helps with real Japanese.
Writing out romaji in Japan is likely to confuse more than help someone else understand.
Agree. Especially how easy it is honestly to learn hiragana. You can practically learn it in a day and keep a table next to you to look up every time you forget one.
If you're at the point you're learning verbs you'd be mad not to know how to read some kana.
I explicitly address my reason for choosing it over kana in the article. If you disagree, please engage with the argument that’s already there.
I started to learn Japanese 30 years ago, and in my experience the people who try to be smart and build systems almost never get decent. It’s procrastination while thinking they’re actually productive.
To add insult to injury this article hasn’t discovered anything new, makes it sound way more complicated than it is, and in the end still requires you to just remember which verbs are of the eru/iru group, and which are not (which was posed as a problem to solve in the intro).
Just make cards and mark the stem, learn it along with the verb. No need for heuristics. If you ever forget, you’re bound to remember the masu-form and can reverse engineer the stem from that 100%.
Why would you expect the article where I’m describing what worked for me to “discover something new”? I’m literally sharing the mental model that I personally found helpful. There’s nothing “new” in learning or teaching a language. But this is the most minimal model I’ve found useful, compared to others, and I wanted to share it with other people.
Similarly, when complaining about how you have to memorize a big table of verb conjugations in the intro, the author links to a table of... -ta forms, a verb form for which the author later concludes you just have to memorize a big table.
> now let's try to apply the rules:
> hanas* + (i)masu = hanasimasu (wrong!)
I had to stare at this for a while to figure out why the author thought it was wrong. "si" is rendered as し on every IME keyboard I've ever used, but the author wants it to be written as "shi".
I don't think this article is really simpler than just learning the table and letting your pattern recognition neural wetware kick in and do its thing. Or better yet, go read some books. After a while, incorrectly conjugated verbs just look/sound wrong.
Um... 話します is the correct conjugation for 話す, what am I missing here?
The author is using an anglicised romaji system and evidently thinking in English, so they think writing 話します as "hanasimasu" is "wrong".
I feel like you’re going out of your way to misinterpret the article. As the article says below:
this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
Then the article includes an exercise that verifies the reader’s understanding.
I also included a note:
> (note i could also have used a different romanization that renders し as "si", つ as "tu", and ち as "ti" for this article. i decided to not because everyone else uses romaji, and once you understand this point once, you shouldn't have a difficulty doing this in your head.)
Where is the factual mistake here? “si” is invalid romaji, my article uses romaji, therefore it’s invalid.
hanasimasu = 話します
I also still don't understand why the author thought this was wrong?
Because the author of the article hasn’t internalized that si is pronounced “shi”, is my guess.
The article literally says:
> there is no "si" in the hiragana table, so s_ + (i) = shi. […] this is why it's important that you don't actually "think in" romaji. […] i'm using romaji as a convenient way to refer to phonetics in text. however, your "mental algebra" should match the hiragana table.
There's different romanization systems and English learners usually use Hepburn
I think it’s probably a mistake to use Hepburn if you’re learning Japanese, it kinda gets in the way. Either learn kana (which takes what, a week?) or use one of the other romanization systems which maps more cleanly to Japanese orthography
The Japanese phonological system doesn't allow a /s/ sound to occur before the vowel /i/, the consonant must undergo palatalization and become /ɕ/ (the IPA symbol for the Japanese sh-like sound). Because this is a regular sound rule, the native writing system doesn't have a way to distinguish the nonexistent */si/ sequence from the /ɕi/ sequence that actually occurs, and this is the syllable that hiragana し or katakana シ indicate.
In the Hepburn romanization system, which generally tries to be transparent to speakers of English or other European languages, し is romanized as _shi_, because this indicates to English speakers that the /s/ -> /ɕ/ sound change happens. In the Kunrei-siki romanization system, which tries to be more faithful to the distinctions made in the Japanese phonological system, し is romanized as _si_ to be consistent with the other possible syllables _sa_ _su_ _se_ _so_ that begin with the consonant /s/.
And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet is a sign that their command of Japanese isn't all that good yet.
> And yeah the fact that the article-writer hasn't internalized this sound change yet
I don’t understand where this misunderstanding about my article comes from. I am saying that the sound at the intersection of “s” column and “i” row is “shi”. My article uses romaji so this is self-consistent. I am also mentioning that there is an alternative system that would romanize it as “si” but that’s not the one I’m using in my article.
> why romaji is actually good
It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu". It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
Mu, bu and nu also all obey the -nda transformation due to phonetics, and not due to how "if we just shuffle the letters around and presto! Nomu becomes nonda".
Japanese already has plenty of its own reading inconsistencies, so adding another layer on top isn't going to help you.
Finally, there's going to be so much kana in your every day life that learning conjugation in romaji is guaranteed to cripple your reading, because instead of recognizing kana (e.g. you see a billboard that says お茶を飲んだ方がいい！ as you frantically try to back-translate everything into romaji, but also removing excess w's and converting nda's as you go) you've spent the first n hours on trying to "hack" the language instead of just learning it.
> It isn't. It falls slightly apart in the `s` column, and completely in the `t` column which contains both "chi" and "tsu".
All of this is described just below, in the section called “why romaji is actually bad”, with these specific examples being tested.
> It also breaks for godan words that end in "u" which become "wa" in the negative form.
This is also described further below in the post.
-u godan verbs historically ended in ふ /fu/ (and earlier /pu/), and were written that way until the 20th century kana reform. So the historical conjugation pattern of a verb like tamau was tamafa-/tamafi-/tamafu-/tamafe- + additional inflectional endings. The /f/ became a /w/ before /a/ but weakened and was lost entirely in other positions, leading to the modern pattern of tamau, tamaimasu, etc. but tamawanai.
As someone that recently went through an introductory Japanese course in Japan, I don't find this much different than how it's taught. Or maybe I'm missing something?
It seems like the article is trying to make the case that in romaji, you can split the letters and isolate the vowel (e.g. the asterix in the article's conjugation).
But we were simply taught to change from the う- row to the い- row (u- row to i- row). I switched to Japanese to illustrate that you can make that statement even without romaji. In that case, it seems like basically the same thing?
As an anecdotal point, my class was mostly non-english speakers and I didn't find the above to be a sticking point for my classmates. The real sticking points were messing up the ichidan verb exceptions (ichidan verbs that look like godan) and conjugating the correct form for the different grammar points. Te and ta form were also a bit tricky. But the article doesn't seem to offer anything new to help there.
Up until just last year "si" "ti' and "tu" were the proper official way to romanize "shi" "chi" and "tsu": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunrei-shiki
And thank the lord that the romanization of Japanese (with its few little quirks) is one of the simplest transliterations there is.
And, since the English equivalent of those sounds doesn't exist, there's no confusion the way there would be between "she" and "see" in english. Complaining that there's no english equivalent of the russian (взгляд / vzglyad)'s initial cluster would be similar in feel - no english words use it, so the romanization can be whatever you like, really.
One big change I had when learning Japanese was that someone introduced to me Cure Dolly videos on YouTube, and it has been an eye-opener: All these verb conjugations are actually attaching another verb to extend its meaning
Calling it concatenation is a little misleading.
Japanese is known as an agglutinative language [0], and how verbs are conjugated also has a lot to do with politeness, as well as local dialects. That's why you can turn on an anime and hardly understand it, even after a couple years of study.
I got to the third year college level in my own Japanese studies, and at that point, memorizing kanji was starting to compete with my computer science studies, so I had to drop it. I got to travel to Japan and live with host families (we kind of settled on a Japanese/English pidgin), so I don't regret the experience.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language
Here's how I was taught verb conjugation.
First, we learnt verbs in the -masu form. Nomimasu, tabemasu and so on.
Then we learnt this song (to the tune of Clementine)
chi ri i tte mi ni bi nde kiite giite
It's a quick mneumonic to help you go from the polite verb to the "te-form" ending. I hummed it in my head while working out the conjugation before it became natural and "obvious".
Fascinating to hear non-tech insight from Dan, especially as a fellow (rookie) student of 日本語.
Fun, and a programmatic perspective. However, it can be too easy and fun to get super caught up in these details, if your goals are some level of fluency and ability to communicate/read. The majority of people that I know who have gained any level of fluency in Japanese as an adult mostly avoided stuff like this because (for many people; of course everybody is different) doing all of this mental math to dive down to the last detail was nowhere near as effective as some speaking and reading drills.
It is definitely well written and presented.
I like to do deep dives like this not to memorise but to understand deeper layers, the spirit of the language, the way it moves, the way it unfolds.
:(
Romaji are great, and in some ways more instructive because they reveal patterns which are otherwise a little hidden. You just have to realize that S+I is shi, T+U is tsu, etc. I don’t want to get too deep into it but there is a regularity to the language, and rules, and different choices of writing system reveals different pieces of the puzzle.
Next, the conjugation itself. There are massive categories of conjugations missing! Like, how do you get from taberu / nomu in this system to tabereru / nomereru? It turns out that these ichidan and godan verbs actually do have some differences in conjugation. Who’d have thought? (There is the -i stem, but there are other forms.)
I usually just consult my handy sheet of BNF rules while speaking Japanese.
this is quite intriguing, as a native speaker and someone with friends trying to learn Japanese, I always had a hard time explaining all the different patterns and just defaulted to "it just is". Will use this in the future!
meh, language learning has an inconvenient truth: sometimes it’s just rote memorization. it's the reflexive belief that every human endeavor must have a hidden optimization waiting to be discovered. Language learning is one of those domains that stubbornly replies, "Cool flowchart. Now memorize 500 words and spend 200 hours listening."
There’s no clever engineer hack that replaces time spent with the language. and with regard to japanese, please stay away from romaji, unless you're still in beginner stage and typing things out to communicate words you already know the phonetics to.
Categorizing Japanese verbs as -ru or -u requires more context.
I prefer the term "group 2 verbs" to "-ru verbs." Group 2 verbs are verbs that end in -eru or -iru, not just -ru. Of course there are some exceptions, like kaeru, which ends in -eru but is actually a -u verb. Conjugation is easy: remove the final -ru and append -masu, -mashita, etc.
"Group 1 verbs" (again, -u verbs) are verbs that are not group 2 verbs. Conjugation is a bit more difficult because the -nu, -bu, -mu, and -u verbs have many suffixes. However, after memorizing these two (-nbmu and -u, because -nu, -bu, and -mu are almost the same), the rest are easy.
There are only two irregular verbs: kuru and suru. Just memorize them.
I learned Japanese by just memorizing. Once you have memorized enough verbs and their conjugations, you can figure out the conjugation of a new verb even if you don't understand how it works.
there are more irregular verbs than just kuru and suru. iku and aru are also irregular, for example.
Irregulars notwithstanding, the conjugation pattern is actually completely lossless if you just remember the imperative form (e.g. 着ろ kiro, 切れ kire) instead of the infinitive, which is lossy (e.g. 着る kiru, 切る kiru). Then there's no need to have to remember, "oh... is this -iru verb group 1 or group 2?"
They’re sometimes called “semi-irregular” because they are mostly regular with, like, one deviation. The list is not long and it is quick to memorize.
Iku is kinda irregular but it's only itte and itta instead of ite/ita. Also aru/nai is more like antonyms rather than conjugation?