Anki was rough today. Didn’t sleep much last night, missed yesterday’s reviews… It’s amazing how much that affects recall. It’s like I know where the vocabulary is in my head but when I run towards it I slam into a brick wall. Frustrating.

Somebody told me the most important thing when learning a new language is your health. Get enough sleep, eat well, exercise often. I really feel that.

I basically have a couple things I’m doing right now:

• Once/week I take a lesson from a private tutor.
  • Each lesson we spend time talking about how our weeks went in Japanese. After that we do grammar points from Genki I & II. The “今週はどうでしたか” (How was your week?) section keeps gradually getting longer and longer as I can hold more of a conversation. This week we spent basically all the lesson just talking (in Japanese!) about my recent trip to Japan. I still fee like it’s baby-level Japanese but it’s exciting nonetheless
• I made a friend in Japan last year and he and I speak on zoom once a week for language exchange
  • His English is significantly better than my Japanese so it’s been a lot of English, which is good for him and I enjoy but we discussed starting to enforce japanese only for the first 20 minutes. We should start that next week
• I’m reading manga in Japanese
  • Currently working through the first book of Sakamoto Days. It’s slow going but I’m finding it engaging enough that I’m having fun reading. I brought a few more volumes with me from a bookstore in Kochi City I went to.
  • One interesting observation: Now that I know a reasonable amount of Kanji I sometimes wish the furigana wasn’t there for the ones I already know. I comprehend the sentences faster if I just look at the kanji but I reflexively look at the furigana anyway…
• Anki vocabulary
  • I started with the genki vocab deck but made some improvements
  • I added a kanji -> kana + english card
  • I’m adding sounds for every word as I learn it (mostly from https://nadeshiko.co/) and pictures when appropriate
• Youtube podcast immersion

Language learning is such an emotional roller-coaster. You go from feeling great about your progress one minute to feeling dumb and terrible the next. It’s nice to be able to look back and remind myself that last year I could barely order coffee in Japanese, but now I’m actually communicating.

Another interesting one is how Japan counts big numbers. There’s a word/character for 10,000 (万 man) and large numbers are multiples of that. So a million is 100x10,000 for instance.

Yes I’ll be going again in the fall probably :) I’m really looking forward to it!

Reminds me of this:

https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio

Played this with my wife. 11/10 would recommend.

I am constantly wishing I could use よろしく when speaking with colleagues and friends.There just isn’t a great simple English equivalent.

Just got back from three weeks in Japan.

• this was the first time I genuinely felt like I could have a decent conversation in Japanese
• I had issues with tenses, forgotten vocabulary, mispronunciations etc but found that I could nonetheless get my point across and have a productive discussion
• my listening / immersion practice has really paid off as I felt like my listening comprehension has greatly improved

It was a lot of fun. I went to three areas:

• Tokyo: people are busy but I was able to practice a lot of functional Japanese: ordering food, asking questions, etc.

• Kochi: I love Kochi. Very few foreigners and people are nice and outgoing (for Japanese people that is). Most locals speak very little if any English. I really enjoyed spending time here and had lots of decent conversations including a long chat with an older gentleman in the onsen at my hotel. (He started the conversation or I wouldn’t have spoken in the onsen). Tosa-ben took a little getting used to

• Kyoto: in my opinion not a good place for Japanese immersion. There’s English everywhere and most people speak very good English. Most shopkeepers would immediately switch to English the moment they saw me even if I greeted them in Japanese. It honestly was a little depressing at times. Also tourists everywhere, many of whom clearly haven’t spent much time learning about cultural norms in Japan. It was fun for sightseeing but I doubt I’ll go back now that I’ve visited the palaces & Nintendo museum

All in all it was a great trip and I feel like it helped my language learning move forward.

Oh! And I bought some Japanese language manga. I finally know enough to be able to read it while only looking up one or two words per page. I’m about halfway through Sakamoto Days 1 and I’m genuinely enjoying the story without the language barrier getting in the way. Progress!

While it doesn’t protect from Google’s anti-privacy tactics, the proton Mail app does strip third party tracking from emails, which can be helpful.

Many companies use a single pixel transparent image (or similar) to identify whether a user has opened an email. They can then build a profile on which emails you opened vs left unread even if you didn’t click anything.

Proton as an email frontend tries to prevent that kind of third party tracking. It also prevents Google from knowing things like how many times you open an email, how much time you look at it, etc.

It’s not revolutionary, and it certainly doesn’t remove the harms of staying with Gmail, but it’s not pointless.

• high performance legacy software like this often uses low-level languages like c, c++, and assembly
• these low-level languages are extremely powerful but require manual management of memory
• that memory management is a common place where bugs like this can be found. This vulnerability is a memory overflow

This kind of bug’s severity and how easily it is to accidentally introduce is why many high performance applications are moving to the rust programming language, which was specifically designed to try and prevent/minimize memory bugs.

This is a very balanced take. I appreciate it ☺️

I flew back to America from Tokyo today and as a frequent traveler to Japan I can tell you it’s all of the above. As a very introverted, easily overstimulated person I love going to Japan because it’s my ‘quiet time’. Coming home I’m usually overwhelmed by the sheer noise of being in America.

1. People simply speak louder than they need to here. In Japan you speak in a hushed voice unless it’s necessary to raise it. Also people aren’t afraid to lean in a little closer to hear what is being said to them. In America people stand 2 meters away from each other and have to speak loud enough for the whole room to hear
2. People speak more and don’t value quiet time. In Japan you don’t speak on trains. Your inane conversation can wait. Its more pleasant for everyone if you just stay quiet. Then an American tourist boards and everyone in the car gets to hear all about their opinions on some anime whether they want to or not
3. People tent to interject / interrupt more here

Hopefully this didn’t come across too much as venting. I can’t wait to go back.

Fascinating, thanks!

Seems simplified Chinese uses that version. But Kanji is Japanese.

Odd that the ‘head’ is mirrored. The real kanji is 骨。agree it looks like a lil skeleton guy though.

I find myself attracted to people who have a little bit of “meat on their bones” but constantly feel bad about myself for not having a completely chiseled physique. It’s unfortunate.

Came here to say this: Anki is infinitely better than some scammy ai enabled nonsense.

The challenge is Anki relies on the student being motivated to pursue the education. The solution to that is the student seeing the value and fun in what they’re learning. That can partially be provided by gamification, but really a passionate teacher with genuine enthusiasm is the best.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/06/nx-s1-5544362/turkey-hair-transplants-tourism

Car GPS: always able to track you.

Phone GPS App: choose your vendor (e.g. openstreetmaps vs Google), set the app to only have location access when in use.

Significantly better control.

Thanks! Yeah I’ll be there for 3 weeks. I’m visiting friends in Tokyo and Kochi, and also taking a couple days in Kyoto to visit the Nintendo museum. Pretty excited!