#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:

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):

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 made a bunch of changes to #my-site this past week, mainly stuff behind the scenes. most notably i added an atom feed for my microblog. i checked it with the browser extension feedbro and it looks okay i think. i also made one for updates to the rest of my site, which you can access here. i enabled rss autodiscovery on the main pages as well to make adding it to your rss reader a bit easier. in addition to moving to neocities, as part of my ongoing effort to curb my #social-media use i'm also trying to read more blogs, essays, and other long-form written media by subscribing to substacks and rss feeds, and i figured i may as well make it possible for others to do the same with my site. (as a side note - i recently discovered the read it later app omnivore and it's been really helpful in actually finishing reading articles i find interesting. i know other read it later apps have existed for a long time, idk why i've been sleeping on them until now.) i restructured a bunch of stuff in the code too, mostly switching some divs for semantic tags and converting all jquery to vanilla javascript, so if something looks broken try hard refreshing (ctrl+f5). turns out theres so much more to web development than the random bits i hacked together from tutorials and stack overflow answers making tumblr themes in 2015... i'm not sure if my site is actually any more accessible or loads faster and i still need to test things with an actual screen reader, but i think my code is easier to read at least.

i think i've had some sort of ear infection for the last couple days. i was gonna go to the doctor today if i wasn't feeling any better when i woke up, but it doesn't hurt anymore so i didn't end up going. i don't know what's up with my body this past year, i usually only get sick once or twice a year but i got sick like three times this winter alone -_- i took advantage of all the time i spent this weekend lying on my side to catch up on some manga (i may or may not have been like 6 months behind on chainsaw man 🙈).

i also #played some piofiore and managed to finish yang's and dante's routes. now yang's route definitely lived up to its notoriety in the otome community but i found his best ending a little underwhelming. i usually do bad and good endings before the best ending and i found those really thrilling (i was even a little moved at the good ending ngl... may have even shed a tear or two) but the best ending... idk. i didn't dislike it but it wasn't as fun as his other endings or nicola's best ending. i found dante a little boring too. i think he kinda got shafted by having to carry the plot of the game on his route lol. i was grateful to finally learn about the key maiden stuff but honestly i spent the first half wishing i could've romanced leo instead. i'm halfway done with this game now and am looking forward to gilbert's route especially. orlock isn't really the type of LI i usually like but i'm also really intrigued by his role in the plot especially after seeing... yang's? best ending epilogue and dante's best ending.

i've been sick the last couple of days, but i'm starting to feel better. i #crocheted this bag with some yarn i found at a thrift store a year ago. i haven't done any fiber arts for like two months since all the windows in my house were replaced recently, so a bunch of stuff had to be packed away. now that everything's been put back i've been able to go through my fiber arts WIPs and tbh i didn't feel like doing any of them lol. i think that since it was all cold weather stuff and now that it's >70°F/20°C i just don't have the motivation to finish them right now and just wanted a quick and easy project to get back into the swing of things.

while crocheting i also #read two books by keigo higashino, a death in tokyo and the final curtain. i think that makes four or five books i've read by him in the past year. i always thought of myself as a fantasy girlie but idk, i've been getting really into japanese murder mysteries this year. i really like how higashino's books aren't really just about the murder mystery but more about the people surrounding the victim, the problems in society and our relationships that can drive people to murder, and how murder and death affect people and how we treat people who have recently experienced loss. i also like how in these two books we see more of kaga as a person, and i'm sad that there aren't any more books featuring detective kaga translated into english. guess that means i just have to work harder at studying japanese 😔

i also #played piofiore for a little bit... i've been in a bit of an otome slump since trying out and dropping virche evermore in january. so far i've only played through nicola's route (idek how i got on his route lmao). as a LI he was nice but didn't really do anything to captivate me. i liked the story though and am looking forward to the other routes, especially yang's since he shares a voice actor with tianyou zhao from the yakuza series.