Simple hard way to conjugate Japanese verbs

Japanese verb conjugation can be simplified by understanding that it's primarily a system of concatenating a verb's stem with various suffixes, rather than memorizing arbitrary rules for different verb groups. The author explains that while traditional teaching methods create confusion through complex categorizations and special cases, the underlying pattern is elegantly straightforward: once you identify a verb's stem, you simply append the appropriate suffix to create different forms (polite, past tense, negative, etc.).