#languagelearning #played #japanese

have any other language learners noticed just how much ai has infiltrated language learning spaces… i feel like i'm probably beating a dead horse here bc damn near everybody in this neighborhood of the internet doesn't agree with genAI, but i've gotten so used to others sharing my convictions that every time i wander outside this bubble i'm always shocked at how much some people use it. and not just use it — trust it! and not just for asking it to translate an idiom or slang not found in dictionaries here and there. i've seen people unironically suggesting others use chatgpt and other llms to:

• generate an entire anki deck
• generate short stories to read
• have written or spoken practice conversations
• translate and break down entire passages (before attempting to read it themselves and only asking for help on parts they don't understand)
• generate example sentences for a target word or phrase that they found in their immersion or in the wild to add to their anki deck (instead of just… adding the original native sentence they found the word in……)

and the damn apps… i swear every other day i see someone advertising their new language learning app that's basically just chatgpt/claude/gemini etc w a custom prompt. now i'm not a software dev so i may be misunderstanding something but… what's the point.

really, what's the point of using llms so extensively to learn a language. it all just seems so inefficient. like after spending 15 minutes setting up yomitan or goldendict i can look up a word or phrase in multiple different dictionaries before chatgpt even loads, then if i so choose add them to my anki deck with the original context and native audio in the time it would take to prompt chatgpt for a definition. on top of that llms love making shit up so u still need to fact check it, by checking a dictionary, asking a native speaker, etc. and it's like at that point why go through the bother of generating cards in the first place? but still i see people swear up and down that the text llms produce are correct and error free. well i'm happy ur so confident in ur own ability to assess bullshit in ur target language (not that they actually can), but the beginners u keep suggesting ur methods to aren't going to know how to. and even when it is technically correct, when i've tested llms in thai to see where these people are coming from, it just fails to produce the idiomatic, slang-filled, sometimes messy but still authentic speech.

and that's really my biggest issue with all this. i always thought the whole reason to learn a new language was to understand people. humans. who make art and write stories and fight and cry and laugh together. to connect to people who may be from a different culture but who still understand our shared humanity. the joy of learning a language is gaining access to the thoughts and feelings of a whole new group of people u couldn't before, to hear their stories… why waste what precious time we have on this earth reading the words of a mere facsimile? what's the point of learning a language if most of ur time with it is a version processed by a machine and not the version of it that lives and breathes in this world? i think these people are going to be in for a rude awakening call when they try to interact with their target language outside of the english-ified slop their favorite llm feeds them and the pleasantries exchanged with the waitress at their local cafe. if these people want to hinder their own ability to understand the authentic speech of their target language in the long run then so be it, but it kills me to think that a beginner might follow their advice or download an app that's just ai in disguise without really thinking about the implications of it.

rant aside… in other news i started my first otome game in japanese, ayakashi gohan. i've played a couple other, shorter visual novels in japanese but this is the first otome game and first what i would personally consider "full length" (30-40+ hrs native speed) VN. i was gonna wait to post my thoughts on it until after i finished but i had the biggest jump scare playing this game that i just HAD to post about: kuroda takaya voices one of the route antagonists.

y'all… when i tell you i DIED! the inhuman sound i made 😭 i knew he's done some BL work but i didn't know he worked on otomes before too. i checked vndb but unfortunately i didn't see any otomes where he voices a love interest :( still added the other otomes where he voices a minor character to my list of VNs i'd like to play one day lol. not only does he voice an antagonist in this game, he plays a tengu named guren who historically has had the right to wed a human woman from the local village. so the plot of yomi's (the actual LI) route is that guren wants to make the protagonist, rin, his wife, and keeps coming onto her despite her repeatedly telling him to get lost, and the challenge it brings to her already fraught relationship with her protector yomi. which means the route was filled with absolutely amazing lines like:

when i say this had me utterly gagged… i would never survive an otome game bc i would walk straight into a bad ending if the villian sounded like kiryu kazuma. like i literally spent the whole route being like yeah rin what's the hold up, forget yomi and let's go already! 😅 i'm not usually a kiryu simp (daigo has my heart, sorry king) but kuroda's work in this route even had me like 😳 the rest of this post are my favorite lines of his along with my rough translations (may not be the best but i promise they weren't written by ai 💖), in case there are any other yakuza fans out there who might want these recordings for… reasons… or just to get a kick out of it.

#plants #played #knitted #thrifted

it's the end of august which means my birthday was a couple of days ago 😇 my friends bought me this pinstripe calathea and a bunch of desserts from vegan east, plus i made pistachio + thai basil shortbread cookies so i think i have my sugar intake sorted for the next month or so ^^

i know i said in my last entry that i'd start raidou kuzunoha 2, but i ended up spending most of the month playing fields of mistria. it's only in early access but i've already played it for almost 50 hours, completing a whole year and finishing all the story + heart events released so far ^^; i love the vibe of the town and the sprite work is SO cute, i can't believe i have to wait a whole year to marry my girl reina 😩 i also hope the creators implement some sort of rival marriage or matchmaker system because i'm obsessed with whatever's going on between juniper and valen.

i also managed to finish piofiore 1926. (mild spoilers for fated memories + 1926 below) i think i liked this sequel a little more than the first game, if only for the alternative + henri route. i love when otome games that have a lot of death in them also have an "everyone lives" route afterwards, and with the alternative route in this game i liked seeing how the LIs interact with the MC when they spend a long period of time being her friend/acquaintance before trying to get with her. especially with dante and nicola, i ended up liking them way more on their alternative route vs. their original route in the first game. legit if dante ever gave lili shooting lessons in his OG route like he does in his alternative route he probably would've ended up being my fav 😪 also i loved seeing the LIs spend more time working together since it meant more time spent bullying yang instead of trying to kill him <3

this month i also worked a lot on my folklore cardigan. i started this in february and had it in storage for like… 5 months… but i finally decided to get it done and now i just have the back piece left. it's the first wearable i've ever knitted and i made a lot of modifications, so hopefully it comes together alright. the yarn is from a cardigan i bought at a thrift store and unraveled, and i was worried that i wouldn't have enough yarn but i think it'll be enough. i managed to thrift and unravel two more sweaters this summer, so i'm excited to get this done and start working on the projects i have in mind for them.

the mitsuba my friend gave me finally grew enough for me to try it! a couple weeks ago a rabbit ate most of the shoots (despite being in a 3ft tall planter -_-) so i was worried but it seemed to bounce back alright. it's more bitter than i expected, but it tastes pretty good in miso soup. apparently it gets more bitter when grown in full sun compared to part shade… probably should've checked that before putting it somewhere that gets like eight hours of direct sunlight ^^;

i also recently beat shin megami tensei: devil summoner raidou kuzunoha. i've read that a lot of people don't like this game (or at least the combat system) but i thought it was pretty fun. i loved that demons could be controlled directly and interact with npcs and the environment, it definitely gave the world some more charm and party formation some much needed depth. i emulated this game with this hd texture pack and it looks really nice. i haven't started the second game yet but i hope i have some time to this weekend. here are some of my favorite screenshots:

my mom bought a new laptop recently and gave me her old ones. they've been slow af and prone to crashes for years so she's been using her phone to watch youtube (so much that it's caused screen burn in -_-). i installed new operating systems on both of them and they seem to function better now (ubuntu server on the 2010 macbook pro and archcraft on the 2012 macbook air). i don't really have much of a use for them but it was fun trying to get them running again. i might mess around with them in the future... they both have surprisingly nice screens for decade old laptops and i feel kinda bad for turning the pro into a server ^^;

i'm not much of an apple fan; my current phone is an iphone xr and the only apple product i've ever bought new. throughout high school and most of college i had this one friend who would tease me, my brother, and another friend of ours for being the only people in our friend group who used android, therefore messing up imessage group chats. now that the three of us are on iphones.... honestly he had a point, imessage is really convenient when literally all your friends also have iphones. the battery on my phone is still good despite being almost five years old so i hope i can still get a couple years out of it before needing to replace it. probably with a used iphone... these days i really only use my phone to call, text, and listen to audiobooks so i don't see the benefits of buying new, and while i really dislike how much less access to FOSS software and easy control over my files the iphone has, ultimately a phone is a tool to communicate and currently an iphone provides me the least amount of friction to keeping in touch with my friends.

my current daily driver laptop is a thinkpad p52, but when i was in high school i had a couple different apple laptops. i still have the one on the left, a 17" 2007 macbook pro. about six months ago i ripped out the 1tb hard drive i had left languishing in there for nearly 10 years and put it in my current laptop's 2.5" drive bay when i started messing with dualbooting linux and needed more space on my ssds, so this laptop doesn't turn on anymore. i actually had another laptop that was a similar model that i harvested parts from to fix up the one pictured, including replacing the screen. when i was in high school my mom loved browsing craiglist to try to find good deals on used tech (especially macbooks... i still don't understand why she insists on paying a premium for apple computers when all she does is watch youtube), except she doesn't actually understand anything about technology so i was always the one who had to fix things and get them in working order. i guess it was good to learn how to do basic computer upgrades and repair, and even now i still use craiglist to buy used tech instead of buying new (i scored my current laptop for only $200!), but i could've done without the being forced on my mother's whim to spend the occasional evening setting up meetings with strangers who sometimes live an hour away just to come back and have to spend hours googling how to fix some random thing i didn't notice when inspecting it -_- the laptop i remember most fondly though that i don't have anymore was an apple ibook g3. it's THE quintessential frutiger aero piece of tech and every day i rue the fact that tech doesn't look like this anymore. the case on the macbook air i have now is translucent and the same shade of teal as the ibook i use to have (like the ad pictured below), so i guess it can be my old ibook's spiritual successor. honestly why does everything only come in like matte black or brushed aluminum these days... i was particularly fond of the charger, which is like a yo-yo since you wrap the wire around a disk.

last night i finally finished my rewatch/reread of the cardcaptor sakura franchise. i was on netflix last month when i saw that the original anime was leaving at the end of the month, and it had been a decade or so since i last watched it, so i figured i was due for a rewatch. i ended up watching it in japanese and thought it was pretty easy for the most part. i also played the playstation 1 game animetic story game 1: cardcaptor sakura, which loosely covers the first season of the anime. it doesn't really feel right to say i played it since there's like five minigames in the whole game, the rest is just watching scenes, but the sprite work is SO cute and the whole game only took me like 3 hours to finish so i can't really complain. i tried to rip the sprites using jpsxdec since i want to turn some into gifs for my toybox page but was unsuccessful. i might mess around with using frame advancing and screenshots to manually cut and gif some sprites in the future though.

i also read and watched the sequel cardcaptor sakura: clear card. even though i loved ccs as a kid i never read the sequel, probably because i was in college when the series started and wasn't into animanga at the time. luckily though the manga is finished now and i was able to binge read the whole thing ^^ i didn't really have high hopes since i don't usually care for series reboots, but i enjoyed it a lot more than i thought i would. i liked that sakura was better able to take charge of situations and leap into action, and syaoran got some moments to show off too. tomoyo and kero were just as adorable as always of course. while i think the main new character, akiho, was a little underutilized and i would've liked her more if she had a personality that wasn't the same as sakura's (i also could've used more touya and yukito tbh), i think the main mystery of clear card was more interesting than the original series and i like how it expanded upon some of the lore (especially around sakura's parents). i read that last year CLAMP announced a sequel to the first season after 5 years but i couldn't find any follow up. the anime had some major changes from the manga that i'm not sure how they're going to deal with in the sequel, but tbh i know i'll be happy as long as i get to see sakura and syaoran animated together again (i may have teared up when they flew together towards the end of the first season...). here are some of my favorite panels (spoiler warning):

the mitsuba seeds my friend gave to me finally sprouted! some of my other #plants are doing well too.

it's been awhile since i last wrote about what i've #read recently. i've read more non-fiction books than i normally do. i never really know how to talk about non-fiction i've read since i don't consider myself an expert on anything, so i don't have the confidence say if a book's contents is true or bullshit or whatever. especially since i like to read stuff i don't know anything about and thus don't have anything to compare it to, i often don't have any deep insight other than "this was really interesting!" but i guess that just because something doesn't move me to write an entire essay in response to it doesn't mean it's not worth sharing with others. i know i've read lots of interesting books and essays just by coming across a mention of them in various blog posts (all the books i'm about to mention are political in nature though so if you don't want to read about that feel free to skip this blog post)

the first book is elite capture by olúfẹ́mi o. táíwò. he states that identity politics has strayed from its roots and has been weaponized to divide groups, even though it was originally envisioned to help build coalitions that could work together to tackle shared issues. he then argues that this didn't occur because of an issue with identity politics itself, but rather because identity politics has suffered from elite capture, or that political and and economic elites have co-opted it to serve their own interests. for awhile now i've been disillusioned with identity politics and standpoint theory in general, since i feel like so many people (especially online) just use such theories as an excuse to dismiss a work for not being "intersectional enough" instead of trying to engage with an idea on its own terms, or bully people who don't post about x issue affecting y group on their social media regardless of their actions irl or their focus on activism in another area; i think it's prevented many so-called leftists from building solidarity and class consciousness. even after reading this book i still feel this way, and i still think it's not just elites but average people who have fractured the left using identity politics. yet i did learn a lot about how elite capture as a process works, and the book did challenge my ideas about how it could still be used for constructive coalition building.

the next book is the righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion by jonathan haidt. he explores how humans evolved our moral intuitions and argues that this intuition comes before our reasoning and justifications for it. he goes on to expound upon his six foundations of morality theory and how they build moral matrices, which in turn works to bind groups together and promote behavior among individuals that benefit group interests, even at the cost of self-interest. i think his theory on how morality works is interesting a definitely aligns with my own experience talking to others about right and wrong and our reactions to ideas that go against our beliefs. i find the final sections where he applies his moral foundations theory to american political analysis a little lackluster though. i guess from the title of the book i thought it was going to be a bigger focus and more in depth than it ended up being, and while i think the earlier sections do a good job at backing up his claims with studies, i think the later sections rely a little too much on constructing narratives to illustrate his point. he also sort of skirts around the issue of how large groups like nations can effectively balance the competing moral matrices of its subgroups when they are often incompatible. i agree with his argument that groups being exclusionary and having different ideals isn't a bad thing, but most of his examples are too small and local to feel compelling. it's like he's afraid of discussing how exactly we're meant to embrace pluralism in the real world when part of another group's ideology oppresses members of our own group. it reminds me of another book i read earlier this year, prey by ayaan hirsi ali, which argues that unchecked immigration from muslim majority countries into the eu has lead to a spike in sexual violence towards women. she explains how islamic culture shapes these men's view on women, and that moving outside of the restrictions of islamic communities can cause some to commit violence against women. she contends that the left's unwillingness to criticize these viewpoints is due to political correctness, that this violence is causing some voters to turn towards the right, and that european nations need to promote more assimilation when accepting refuges in order to protect women's rights. while haidt argues in the righteous mind that liberals tend to care so much about the care/harm and liberty/oppression foundation that it inhibits their ability to understand and accept other moralities, i think that those on the left do accept pluralism in some cases—just not white christian morality—even at the expense of the well-being of members in their own group (in this case, women). i realize that haidt's book is mainly meant to be descriptive of how differing morality systems are formed and their evolutionary benefit instead of prescriptive of what systems are right or not, but to basically end the book with saying "let's all talk to each other in good faith 💖" just felt shallow. it's also painfully obvious to me that this book was published in 2012. i read antisocial by andrew marantz earlier this year as well which discusses the rise of the american alt-right and how social media has made it easier to become radicalized into extremist ideology, and i would love to see how haidt would apply his morality theory to more niche political groups such as the alt-right as it's clear that when he discusses american conservatives he's referring to the traditional christian kind and not necessarily the reactionary libertarian trolls marantz discusses in his book.

the last book i wanted to mention is the creation of patriarchy by gerda lerner. she traces how patriarchy as a way of structuring society developed in western civilization starting from ancient mesopotamia, and argues that while biological differences exist between men and women, gendered relationships are something that evolved over time. honestly it was way more in depth about discussing the archaeological evidence for her theories than i was anticipating, and considering the fact that i almost never read about ancient history and am uneducated on the topics she was writing about it was tough at times for me to digest everything. i can't really speak authoritatively on the accuracy of her arguments since i know fuck all about ancient history, but i think the tone with which she writes is engaging and she writes clearly enough that i could more or less follow her main points even when they were hard for me to believe (her speculation that man learned how to subjugate and enslave other groups by first subjugating women stands out to me as one). the prose also didn't make the book feel as though it were published in 1986, it never seemed dry or overly academic. i generally find history books boring i found myself compelled to keep picking this one up.

my friends just got back from japan! this is what they brought back for me. now i've gotten my fair share of grow-in-a-cup sets that are always too small to germinate all the seeds they supply but this is by far the most egregious lmao. there's gotta be more than 20 seeds in this bag. did the manufacturer expect me to germinate each seed individually or something? the cup is cute and i've never eaten the plant, 三つ葉 or japanese wild parsley, before so i'm quite excited to try it out... but i'll definitely be sowing it in a real planter tomorrow. i was also quite surprised by how much of the packaging and instructions i could read. last week i got some japanese stationary (a pilot kakuno fountain pen and a kokuyo campus notebook and paper) whose instructions i could read a fair bit too. maybe i have actually learned something in the last eight months i've been studying japanese?!

this past thursday was the first day of the farmer's market that i usually go to. the first couple weeks it's usually just starter herbs and flowers, plus some hanging baskets of flowers. this year in addition to the usual basil, thyme, and other herbs i like to grow, i bought some snapdragons and violets to put in planters to spruce up my front door steps a bit. i really enjoy this part of spring, past the last chance of snow and freezing temps where i can finally get a bit of gardening done before the heat of summer comes, even though i have to suffer through my seasonal allergies.

i also cleaned up some files on my pc since my storage is running a bit low. here's some gaming screenshots that i particularly liked but never posted anywhere.

i added a new page on #my-site last week for my favorite video game locations. i've had this idea for awhile now, and i knew i wanted animated backgrounds, but i didn't know how to best implement them. after fiddling with turning my recordings into gif, webp, and mp4 files i learned about the avif format and omg the file size... it's like a tenth of the size of the gif versions i made and the quality is way better too. i was able to make the gif on my languages page 5mb (it was originally... 50mb....... 🙈) and the haruka gif on my resources site homepage only 552 kb! makes me wonder what the hell i was doing spending all that time on tumblr making gifsets while fighting for my life to make each gif less than 10mb 😭 i still have more places i want to add, but i need to find more free cam/no hud mods for some games.

i also overhauled my resources site to be generated with 11ty. it's now completely navigable without javascript enabled, even on mobile 🥳 i'm gonna keep tweaking my personal site to be functional without javascript. i saw some examples of pure css sidebar toggle on codepen that i want to try to implement. i doubt anyone who might view this site on mobile would also not have javascript enabled (tbh it's hard to think that anyone views this site at all), but i think it's a fun challenge. i feel like i learn more about what's possible with just html and css, and it gives me new ideas for my site.