I learnt the verbs as う- and る-verbs too. I figure there’s many ways to divide the verbs, all of which have exceptions. However, what I feel is the absolute daftest way is to divide them into groups called “group 1” and “group 2”, because there’s literally nothing at all about those names that tells you what’s distinctive about the verbs in those groups.
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Yep, those are hopeless. They are even more cryptic than godan/ichidan. BTW when I first heard the terms “ichidan” and “godan”, not knowing exactly what they mean, I thought - Well, ok, here’s 1 and 5, but what about numbers inbetween? Where are nidan, sandan and yondan verbs? 
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Ah yes I see, yeah I think ‘common’ verbs is probably more appropriate a name as they’re the most common (besides する verbs which are really just nouns) but for the sake of simplicity, “regular with exceptions” is probably less daunting to new learners and as a blanket rule doesn’t steer you too far wrong (you’ll likely be corrected on any missues anyway) xD
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I think the issue is that it feels really weird to classify ichidan and godan verbs as iru-eru and ‘regular’ verbs because both groups are regular. Calling one group regular implies that the other is not, which is… really weird in this case, because ichidan are just as regular as godan (more regular, if anything).
So it’s not the classification itself that I think people are taking issue with. It’s fine. And I already said above that I don’t really care what people call things as long as the groupings and the results are correct.
But this particular example is just… weird, because while the grouping is exactly the same (and therefore perfectly fine), the name of groups is super misleading for no apparent reason.
Because when talking about linguistics, usually ‘regular’ means ‘following a specific pattern’ and irregular means ‘breaking all patterns,’ and I believe most people are aware of that definition.
But what you’re talking about uses the wors regular differently, putting eru/iru verbs as a separate category from ‘regular’, even though linguistically they are regular verbs in the sense that they are not irregular.
It’s just needlessly confusing.
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Aye, I pondered that too, but it’s not that they’re ranked in some order, it’s how they conjugate. 一段 verbs have one stem. For example:
- 食べる
- 食べない
- 食べられる
- 食べます
- 食べよう
五段 verb have five stems:
- 飲む
- 飲まない
- 飲める
- 飲みます
- 飲もう
So, you can see from this that 二段 verbs had two stems, and 四段 verbs had four. 三段 has never existed. All 五段 verbs used to be 四段 - the ～おう imperative ending is a recent addition (used to be ～あう) - 二段 verbs simply ceased to exist (though there is one hold-over: 得る, which today is an 一段 verb, used to be 二段, because it can be read as both うる and える depending on how it’s conjugated).
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You’re asking me to defend a teaching style I am not responsible for creating. I don’t find it confusing at all, so I can only vouch for how effective I and others have found it, if you don’t like it that’s fine don’t use it, but op stated they found Ichidan Godan confusing, so I offered this as a simpler alternative, even if it’s not all encompassing, it can still be useful enough to allow you to be functional in Japanese.
But again I’m not the creator, so I’m not gonna defend it further than my own experience of using it. For me it’s quite simple, the congugationof being an いる、える verb are grouped as such because they end in those syllables, so are regular or uniform in the sense that they all end in those syllables, and are conjugated according to their own uniform set of rules.
Regular verbs follow a shared conjugation pattern between them too, and are also ‘uniform’ in the use of this rule, but is not comment on the uniformity of iru eru verbs.
I understand where you’re coming from linguistically but as a learner, these issues simply never proved a problem to me and many others, and dissecting these styles is kind of really getting off topic and overwhelming op with information they really don’t need at their level.
Edit: also I think Belthazar above explains it far better than I ever could.
I mean, I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. I may have come off the wrong way. I just saw that a lot of people were taking apart this JFZ grouping, and I was attempting to put out why I think people are taking issue with it.
And yeah, I like Belthazar’s description too. It looks eerily familiar somehow…
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That’s fine I understand what you mean, I’m just not really interested in debate, I was just providing information about the style to OP and how it explains things to those that wanted further clarification 
perhaps a discussion thread would be useful?
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