Still at it. Decided to add in some anime (no subs/JP subs) for listening practice. The idea is to apply the same approach to my listening that bore fruit last year with my reading of the Tadoku graded readers as per their “golden rules:” start on the easy side, no lookups, ignore difficult words/sentences, and move on to the next episode/series if it’s feeling tough or not interesting.

I’d pass on this if I were you. At $12 a month that’s already more than half of the cost of a claude.ai subscription, and even after just a couple days working on your prompt engineering, I imagine you could get Sonnet to generate stuff just as good without the restrictions this app has.

That said, I don’t know if any AI model is currently trained on a large enough body of text in Catalan to give you stuff that doesn’t have a massive hallucination rate.

The funny thing is the ads I’ve been seeing lately have been saying Krashen’s model is out of date and are encouraging people to work on their output instead with their chatbots.

The Outer Wilds. Completely not for me.

I’m not big on puzzle games in general and I found the ship controls infuriating.

Just started week 4 with it, and I’m already seeing amazing progress in Shin Kanzen Master N2 Grammar already. So far, this book has absolutely lived up to the high praise it gets. I’m actually looking forward to grammar study every day. Inconceivable thought just six months ago with Tobira.

Everything else is moving smoothly. No more planning, just doing the work. Still going to be concerned about listening comprehension for a while until I hit a couple benchmarks with it (hopefully soon), but vocab and kanji are proceeding apace.

Yeah, I was there in 2004, would have loved having jisho.org and kanji OCR in my pocket back then for everyday use. Let alone all the learning aids.

I mean, if I didn’t have a standing appointment to watch game showcases with some friends, I could definitely see a scenario where I missed this. It’s not the kind of thing that would pop up at all in my regular gaming feeds.

The funny thing is that I was genuinely tired of seeing it at every single State of Play for however long it’s been now. It was heavily marketed within a specific media channel, and didn’t stir up any controversy or buzz that reached my eyes or ears.

Self-care’s the foundation of any effective learning. Good sleep, hygiene, relaxation. Sometimes your body just takes the time for you in these situations.

You’re doing the thing, try to give yourself a little grace in a tough time.

Hey, before you know it you’ll be on this comprehension level! 😂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKE8V6QDdqk

I think I just like her content and vibe a lot more too. Shun’s been very comfortable to listen to on a comprehension level but I’d kinda rather hear about Japan, lol.

Plus it’s so much better for me to listen to a fem speaker to emulate.

Had probably the most significant moment yet since I started serious study last summer: a real, tangible level up in listening. I realized this week the podcast I’ve been using for practice for quite a while (Shunsuke Otani’s Japanese with Shun podcast) is starting to feel trivial for learning at times. Decided to try an intermediate podcast (あかね的日本語教室) that I gave up on last year because it felt like way too much. Today, I had 80, maybe even 85% comprehension or more.

Felt so good to see major progress in my weakest area.

It happened again in the newest game, too. I was so disappointed. Thought we were past this 😭

I think that’s just the hardcore raiding crowd everywhere. I’ve seen it across multiple MMOs. When you’re that highly invested in something, any changes are going to get under your skin. Especially so if competition for seats is involved.

What I wish was more universal was the dungeon etiquette. It’s been a few years since I was in World of Warcraft, but the pick-up group dungeon experience there had the most toxic people I’ve ever seen in gaming by a long way. And I’ve solo queued in League of Legends!

Based on years of experience moderating a public Discord server:

• Weirdest - Trails. Unfortunately, this is weird in the problematic way; think Pragmata. Some of the most well-known names in the fandom are that kind of weird. The series doesn’t do itself any favors leaning into it a bit, too. Adding to it is the perception that series fans are gatekeeping when they tell you to play the series in order when in reality, yes, the developers are insane enough to keep building a continuous narrative that’s gone 20 years, One Piece-style. Hard to convince people of that when video game series just don’t do that.

• Nicest - Stardew Valley. I agree with the others here on that.

• Meanest - Fire Emblem. I’ve seen some wars, holy hell. Aside from general fandom insularity from out-groups, there are intense, internecine wars going on within the fandom over the newer parasocial elements in the series. And then there are waifu wars on top of that within the part of the fandom that’s embraced the parasocial stuff. It’s a fandom crucible.

You’re welcome to join us over at Seventh Heaven. It’s a generalist JRPG server but we do have a small cadre of Trails fans.

That said, Trails was going to be my vote for weirdest, heh.

Reality check for me last week: I don’t know how I missed it, but the JLPT has hard minimums for each section. That means I have to really focus on my listening development or all this other study isn’t going to matter. And I just got some feedback that I’ve got some fundamental issues with my listening. How quickly I can shore all that up is unknown.

Suddenly feeling much less confident about passing the exam. I’m still full steam ahead on the study project, but it’s really starting to look like I’m not going to be able to do all the grammar prep. Might have to triage some stuff.

As long as you don’t go into the countryside or anything, people tend to know enough English for you to get by if you need help with something. Just knowing katakana alone would give you a huge boost over the average tourist. It’s everywhere over there.

I’m considering options, and the shifting political climate there has moved Japan down slightly on the list as a target for me, but fortunately most of the anti-immigrant sentiment there seems to be anti-Asian. For now.

I hear you on that for sure. Most of my Japanese production is on Discord these days, honestly.

Only working on Japanese currently. Technically I started in 2000 with undergrad classes, kept studying very part-time until a semester in Osaka a few years later. After, I almost entirely dropped it, just very light immersion here and there through media.

Why did I start? A friend asked me to do it with him and I needed to fill out my full-time course load. Always had an interest in the culture but languages have always been one of my weaker subjects, so I had to be talked into it. He ended up dropping the class halfway through the term, of course.

Around five-ish years ago I learned about SRS and picked up a program to start getting some of the vocab and kanji back. Also flipped through some old grammar. I started feeling how much I’d lost. Really demoralizing, and didn’t have much motivation to push past it.

About three years ago I started getting more serious about it, once I heard about Seth Clydesdale’s amazing Genki resources site. Genki is the popular beginner’s textbook, and his site let you do the book’s exercises online with some nice features. Sadly, the site got a takedown request, but before that, I revisited the last six chapters of Genki II with it. Ended up taking some time off when I went back to college for a short stint, but last year is when I really started to take it seriously. I finally switched to Anki and started doing 2+ hours a day of study and immersion.

Around the same time, I started developing an AI workflow for career development, and it was a complete game changer for my language learning. I use it mostly for planning and research, especially self-teaching pedagogy. That’s how I discovered i+1 language learning (huge), a better way to manage my time, motivate me, make accommodations for ADHD, etc. While it’s tempting to rely on AI heavily for questions, it’s definitely not a replacement for asking a native user of the language. If you do, stick to stuff within your i+1 range so you have a good idea of when it’s hallucinating an answer. While hallucination rates are better these days, it still happens. And follow up on the sources it gives you!

Once I started my new workflow, I went back to Seth’s site for Tobira (it’s still active!), an intermediate textbook. I went through it all over last summer, fall, and winter, just finishing it a few weeks ago. Now I’m doing planning for focused study on the JLPT N2 exam, and I’m feeling pretty good about taking it in December.

What are my future plans? N2 is the big goal, for a lot of reasons not entirely related to language learning itself, but my overall goal is to have the language be self-reinforcing. I want to get to a point where I can just pull up Bluesky or an NHK article and sustain the language. It’d be a disaster to lose progress again like I did last decade. I think I’m pretty close to this point, actually. I do have production work to do–the JLPT doesn’t test English-to-Japanese production, so I’ve let it lag–but after that, I don’t know! Where I go with the language will depend on other life factors at that point.

Yeah, it’s a good move. I have a Bluesky feed for it but I’m not on it super often.

I tried Misskey for a little while but I’ve never felt more old, hah. Felt like it was all teenagers.

Had a really cool moment last night. My milestone goal for my parsing drills this month was to grab a complex sentence from native material and to parse it perfectly. I was browsing Denfaminicogamer and selected one and nailed it. It had a double-nested relative clause and and a clause with three modifiers in it!

This was a big “I’m ready for native content” moment. Just need to up my reading speed. And vocab acquisition/nuance will of course be lifelong.

So yeah, I’m moving onto the new study plan next week, which will take me up to the JLPT exam in December. Or maybe I’ll get ambitious and start it this week!