#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.

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):

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?!