Finally gritted my teeth and reviewed my N2 lesson plan pace and…it’s not good. I won’t finish SKM by test day.

I’ll take my first timed mock exam on one section (Grammar) in about a week. Full mock exam two weeks after that.

The open questions are whether I need to start flashcards on the new grammar forms–I held off because I was expecting more natural SRS from the study–where I need to skip in the books, and how I’m going to do on test-taking time limits.

My scores have been great for months on the section exercises, way above the JLPT pass rate. But those exercises don’t test closed-book retention on the new grammar or time, and there’s topics/question types I haven’t covered yet. It’s just a matter of whether or not I’ll get to all of that in time, and whether I’ll be fast enough on test day.

ganbaru ne!

The game changer for me was switching from podcasts to videos. I started this most recent stint of study a few years ago at the upper beginner/lower intermediate level, so slow-speed content was already at the point where it wasn’t helpful. But because I couldn’t control the speed of input easily like I could with reading, I kept blanking out during podcasts and getting more frustrated than anything. There aren’t a ton of intermediate Japanese podcasts, so it wasn’t long before I ran out of options.

I finally started to try videos, and it was this What’s in My Emergency Mini-Pouch? one that made it click for me: when I’m being shown what the speaker is talking about and pre-loading expected vocab in my brain, it’s far easier for me to keep pace. I already had the vocab in my brain, it was just a matter of connecting auditory input to that database. This sort of content is like a children’s TV show, or even an unboxing video.

If you’re able to find this kind of content at your level, I think it could help. Just keep in mind it will require focused, active listening.

A couple other notes, if your brain is anything like mine (or, in other words, things I would tell past me):

• I’d avoid re-listening right now. Pattern recall overriding decoding is definitely a thing, and you’ll need practice in both phonetic automaticity and word processing at speed to get your decoder online. My research has told me that needs bulk input. The only exception here, since you mention you’re not producing, is that your familiar content might be a good place to start shadowing. Flashcard sentences are another good spot.
• Interesting content tends to come later, and at some point you just have to put in the reps. The intersection of “interesting” and “appropriate for my level” dips dramatically as one moves into the intermediate stage until, eventually, native content opens up. You might have to stick with easy and/or boring content for a while until listening becomes effortless, and you move from “what did they say?” to “I don’t know that word.”

Warcraft is notoriously low margin by present-day live service standards, but it sure looks like they are getting there: the new race comes with $30 price tag and beta access is only in the $60 or $80 tiers.

Wild prices considering a product heavily built on top of existing assets.

The “don’t make waves” social pressure is one of the most troubling elements of family abuse and violence to me. And it’s so deeply internalized that I wish people were more willing to think twice about what healthy boundaries mean even in the closest families.

I was in a conversation a while back with a man I respected, soft-spoken and gentle by all appearances, who, when the topic (indirectly) came up, insisted that there’s nothing anyone could do that justifies being shunned from a family. Even when pressed, he doubled down on it.

Hearing that made me really uncomfortable and I didn’t figure out exactly why until recently. I don’t interact with the man anymore, but I can only hope it came out of a place of privilege, of never experiencing some of these horrors within his own family, not out of some sense of threat to what he felt entitled to–but I have my doubts.

The answer to both is variations on public domain works can be protected by trademark and copyright. Type A isn’t Korobeiniki, it’s a new work. It’s the same reason why Disney’s Snow White is protected by copyright (for a little while longer, anyway), but the original work it is based on is not.

You want this kind of protection. Otherwise works would effectively be held by the original artists in perpetuity, as a lack of protection even after they enter the public domain chills any investment in variation on those works that might lead to significant cultural impact.

I encourage you to read up on the basics and the reasons why these laws exist in the first place. This sort of thing is how we end up with misinformation like “piracy is legal if you own the original game” and “it’s 100% legal to jailbreak a video game console.”

Already confirmed, I’m afraid

New month, new me: decided to make two changes this week.

First, I’m moving from regular study throughout the week to two big, chunky days that I take off work. I’ll still be doing Anki on the regular schedule but since that’s been winding down (I’m already down to only 90 reviews a day), it’s going to be pretty quick soon. I noticed I was just always exhausted trying to cram together work and study in a day, trying to rush through work so I’d have enough time, and then just being a little fried while trying to study. We’ll see how it goes later in the week, but at least work today felt so much more comfortable.

I know there’s a bit of debate on being regular vs. not (aside from SRS materials, obviously), so I’d love to hear from anyone that’s had success with longer study periods.

And then second, I’m setting aside Shin Kanzen Master’s Grammar book this week. I’m two thirds of the way through it with three months to go, and I think I’ve been kinda leaning on habit by doing it as much as I have. Once I went through the catalog of new grammar forms to give me the foundation for the other books, the plan was to spread time evenly across Grammar, Listening, and Reading. That hasn’t happened. Reading in particular I’ve barely gone through as I haven’t been convinced of the book’s actual instructional value, but it’s still reps targeted right at N2 level. Not like I’m going to find better reading practice.

Was hoodie until I started growing my hair out.

But yeah, this is absolutely the time of year I’m checking the forecast every day to see when fall arrives.

Guess it depends on one’s definition of traditional. Final Fantasy X had the multi-turn summons, and that’s the last game that fits the constant drumbeat of calls for returning to high budget, turn-based FF that persists in the fandom.

Nah, nothing to do with being on FF9 right now. I have absolutely no idea where their read of Bravely Default comes from. BD is a subversion of Final Fantasy, not satire. The story works so well exactly because it leans so heavily on FF tropes. You don’t bring in a heavyweight like Naotaka Hayashi just to crack wise. Saying “nothing in the game feels serious” is “did we even play the same game?” territory as far as I’m concerned. Agnes’s voice actor is literally wailing into the microphone with grief at one point. They put that cast through hell.

On the art, BD’s lineage traces back to the Final Fantasy III remake. Three games removed from that, it stops being a technical decision at that point and just iteration. Like Final Fantasy Tactics, the game is Akihiko Yoshida’s take on the series.

IRL, her name was Jamie, she had glasses and was super smart and pretty. I even wrote a letter and everything that I absolutely did not deliver, hah.

Famous, earliest I can remember is Kate Winslet in that emerald green dress at the Oscars in 1998.

Hah, no. Though maybe there should have been 🤔

The kind where they are bitter rivals both chasing college valedictorian and also hate each other for being from different social classes (one’s a legacy and a real merciless piece of work, the other’s full scholarship).

I did! My week would be lost without my Sunday planning sessions. So the week is not lost.

Was supposed to put in a full work day today…spent half the day writing toxic yuri instead 😬

Had a great week of study, the problem is the great part was performance and not time investment. Another month is about to tick off the calendar and I’m still behind on my pace for the JLPT.

Because good performance cross-cut across all three parts of the exam (12 out of 13 on grammar exercises, 4 out of 4 on listening passages, 2 out of 2 on reading passages), this was the first week I can honestly say I actually feel confident about my ability to pass the exam once I cover all the topics. The problem is I’m just not putting in enough reps to hit all the topics and build the test-taking speed I’ll need.

I don’t really have a solution for this as my time demands are not going to decrease by December. If anything, they’ll get worse. The plan right now is to just do my best.

Usually, mnemonics are my nuclear option if it gets to this point. I guess one could say I have a sliding scale with my vocab, where I step the word up if it’s problematic:

• base word
• base word with sentence
• base word with sentence and meaning note
• base word with sentence, meaning note and/or mnemonic

Here’s an example. A while ago, for some reason I constantly mixed up 転ぶ (to fall down/over, pronounced korobu) and 運ぶ. (to carry/transport, pronounced hakobu). hakobu is a very high frequency word, so even seeing/hearing the word wasn’t enough. I initially tried a visual mnemonic with the kanji, which didn’t stick (and French doesn’t have, of course). Eventually I connected the word hako, meaning “box,” to hakobu.

hako wo hakobu. Carry a box.

It’s been much stickier since, although I still sometimes find myself sometimes briefly pulling up the binary choice and the mnemonic before selecting correctly. The association’s still there, but it’s faded a lot since I’ve put in more time with the language.

Meger’s article on phys.org on her study is worth a read, as is the study itself. There’s a link to it in the article, and this kind of sociology research is approachable.

Her comments on algorithms as a driving factor weren’t in the original article for this post, but that’s my biggest takeaway from this study. I think we’re starting see real danger in how efficiently algorithms accelerate and harden extreme behaviors. It’s never been easier to go from extreme content to extreme content to a conversation with a person that validates that content.

Sometimes society tolerates the ugly things, but when the environment they dwell in starts to catalyze them into more, things get untenable. I think it’s past time people started pushing for full transparency about algorithmic recommendation design so we can have a real conversation about the dangers of it.

Could go either way. Here’s some of the quotes from the teachers:

• “Girls having to clean up because it’s their job.”
• “Boys thinking girls can’t carry anything heavy.”
• “Men should earn more money because they work harder.”
• “Girls can’t play footy/soccer.”
• “My dad said you are a woman and you don’t know.”

Lots of talk about Andrew Tate videos going viral, too (though I’d hope that’s older students).

My read here is that the study backs you up on that, since it suggests the misogynistic attitudes are driving so much of the extremism, but the survey didn’t get more granular than frequency of use. What I’d love to know is if certain categories of pornography overlap with advertising for the manosphere, since the picture coming into focus here is one of overlapping, rather unpleasant content soup.

The math in the study does show a moderate correlation between frequency of pornography use and misogyny.

However, the key finding of the study is that once one accounts for misogyny and other hostile attitudes, the correlation of online behaviors with violent extremism mostly falls away. It’s heartbreaking to read that their teacher survey found misogynist attitudes in children as young as six and seven. Meger’s recommendations at the end of the study focus at length on catching this stuff early.