Yes, so if your job contract is beyond one year it’s something you want to get an early start on. Technically using the international license on NOT a tourist visa isn’t allowed but it’s a legal gray area.
I transferred mine. At the time that required a ton of paperwork, official translation of my American license, a 10 question quiz, and the drive test. The drive test is on a closed course you need to memorize where you have to drive in the most illogical way ever.
They did not and roundabouts still give me brain farts. The vast majority of my 2 hour renewal lecture was “old people do unpredictable things, here’s how to not hit them.”
Please forgive my ignorance (and I apologize in advance for any discussion spiraling from this), but is the name “Milk Tea” literal or rhetoric? Like, do they actually put milk in tea or mix them together?
A free origami is always a win
You seem to have enjoyed the convention The photos are also great and the art is magnificent
YOU’RE GONNA CRUSH IT
DIE DEUTSCHE BAHN
This is very nice of them I’ve never heard of someone being treated so nicely by the DB before this So, good job DB
I’m gonna abstain from making any comments
I’m gonna assume they taste a bit different (in a good way ). Glad you enjoyed your time in Essen
I wonder how long that will take
Glad to see you have kind of a rest day back home after all the travel you went through
an aside about water that probably no one cares about anymore, but this is how long it took me to catch up
Sweet water (Sußwasser) is just fresh water (as in, not salty), and can be in lots of forms like rain, rivers, groundwater, etc. Tap water is fresh water, but is referred to specifically in that video because tap water in most places in Germany comes from groundwater/springs so even if there is lots of rain, that doesn’t really mean much for groundwater that was collected thousands of years ago. On human time scales, rain water mostly ends up in rivers, not groundwater.
(interesting video by the way, but I feel like she missed a trick. She went into super detail into what water stress means and specifically for Germany which was really cool, and then when talking about avocados, took a totally different approach and didn’t consider how does water stress look like in regions that grow avocados vs a region that grows chickpeas. Like if chickpeas are grown where there isn’t water stress (which I think might be true in many regions) then taking up more water to grow them isn’t problematic so I thought it was weird she didn’t connect the dots on the topic she had just been speaking about. I felt like she wanted to eat her avocado in peace)
that sums up this log
me on roundabouts the first time:
cathunk
my brother: ‘I think you were supposed to go around that’
Yes, we’re kicking off a new arc! I signed up for a course, where I’ll have classes each day between Monday and Friday at least for the next two weeks ^^
My goal is not necessarily to become proficient at Mandarin, because I know how much effort it requires and I’m not willing to dump that much effort, it’s more to learn how to learn Mandarin and then who knows, maybe in 2050 I’ll try to find a Wine wrapper or try to translate the source code that polv has been working on:
into something that actually works on macOS.
So out of all of the languages I’ve had classes of in my life, including weird things like Spanish, Swedish or Toki Pona, this is the one that I have the least exposure to in terms of media, soft power and how it works
Following the recommendation at the classes today, I did watch the first episode of a c-drama called Pursuit of Jade (逐玉) that was funded by Netflix to make it to the platform, it has all of the proper languages support and so on, so why not give it a try ^^
The acting was a little better than I expected from a 40-episode series and I liked the winter in it, the main protagonist was a badass and I was trying to pick on some of the exclamations, so woo ^^
Anyway though, the whole course is conducted in German and as it turns out, my language goals of German are almost literally there: learning another language from German from scratch really proves that I’ve made it and I’m really happy about this ^^
One thing that nobody in the group seems to know is that I configured my Yomitan popup dictionary to also have Mandarin support and it’s been really useful at the classes today ^^
Unfortunately, my brain is doing really bad at keeping track of the characters making up pinyin pronunciation and tones at the same time, it feels I can either remember how the character is supposed to be read with plain latin letters of just remember the tone of the character, and not remember how to read it xddddd
Our teacher is a Chinese woman who’s married with children with a German guy (also she did shame me for not having children at 28, biological clock ticking, woo xddd) and she’s very big into the storytelling aspect of Chinese and wants for us to learn the language through telling and understanding stories, as according to her, every character hides an additional story in its image and the radicals it uses
Two people in the group have context with B1+ish Japanese, so the characters were a bit easier to explain to us, and of course we’ve had the best food early on already ^^
But in terms of the context of why I even decided to sign up for Chinese in the first place, and I didn’t make it a big secret, I have a feeling that the soft power of Chinese is very strongly affecting me recently, between Everything Everywhere All At Once, even Alysa Liu (again xdd) and a game I mentioned recently, 1000xResist, that just made me go like “NO WAY I HAVE TO DO MORE RESEARCH ON THAT”
When I played the game first, I did mention a character Jiao who’s from Hong Kong in the future (forced by the Chinese government to speak Mandarin and not even realizing she was supposed to be speaking Cantonese) and the voice actress who played her, Sunny Daydream Chen, absolutely SMASHED the role and created a character living at the intersection of Chinese and Canadian culture, that I didn’t even know how much I’d appreciate until I heard it in action xdddd
So, yeah, Chinese century for the next two weeks, and then who knows what after that ^^
(AAAA I MADE IT IN GERMAN IM SO PROUD OF MYSELF FOR UNDERSTANDING IT ALL AND BEING ABLE TO CHAT AS WELL)
Life
So there is a Chinese-adjacent restaurant chain that’s gaining popularity in Berlin recently, it’s called Wen Cheng and they have 4 restaurants in Berlin already, I love their 𰻞𰻞麵 (look at the amount of strokes in this character btw xddd) because you can select the level of spiciness at Asian spicy and it REALLY IS ASIAN SPICY xdddd
Anyway, I did manage to celebrate my new course with them today ^^
There is a weird hand in Moabit that’s giving me the creeps, especially the nail polish, but they keep on reapplying it each time people start painting over the nails xddd
I saw their ad at DoKomi and didn’t realize the Minions were coming THIS EARLY, I remember having gone in a Minion shirt to Minions 2, that was the time people were making it a big cinematic event wearing suits to the screening and acting like professional movie reviewers, probably won’t be a thing this time, but it’s the best Labubu-adjacent thing we’re getting in 2026, I’m sorry xdd
Also, Chinese century, Taiwanese mochi good (is this a controversial opinion???) xddd
if you manage it get the source code (can be download as a ZIP file), it’s as simple as installing requirements, and run python app.py. No build steps required. It should simply work on any OS that can run Python.
My impression is just – use Hanzi from Day 1, remember vocab regardless of using new Hanzi. Maybe also new phonology.
Knowing several Kanji first, plus audio shadowing for this yet another language, could help get started.
Tones are just another part of vowels in some romanization systems. Syllables might not be equally paced, unlike Japanese.
Nice, it seems to work just fine ^^
I still don’t know many Chinese words yet so I typed in the Japanese spelling/characters in the SRS and it didn’t let me pass, as expected xddd
I tried setting Gemma 4 a while back, but I only have 24GB of unified memory, so while multitasking I can at best run the Q3 quant with a good thinking budget and context and Llama.cpp works much better than Ollama for me. I saw it doing a lot of weird things when I was testing it with Continue.dev and Opencode, and I’m not willing to buy into APIs, so not today yet, unless I’d run them through OpenRouter or Nvidia’s cloud, but oh well
Not a very ambitious title and it even did use furigana to assist reading, I like that the main guy is direct to the degree that he’s intimidating though, slay king ^^
(I actually forgot to copy-paste notes from our lesson’s chat today, I’ll have to ask for them tomorrow xddd)
But yeah, today we were mostly bashing our heads against tones and we did a lot of pronunciation exercises, and good news, I understand the differences between tones and can recall them pretty quickly, bad news, tone 2 and tone 3 in mandarin are really hard to distinguish in my own speech when I produce them. Doesn’t help that if you have tone 3 and tone 3 right next to one another, the first syllable becomes tone 2(.5ish), so words like 很好 are even trickier to think the pronunciation of than you’d think at first
But yeah, more character building today, some syllables
which, as it turns out, the character written as “r” is pronounced [ʐ], exactly the same way as “ż” in Polish, and I’m the only one who can pronounce it in the group, but also, WHY would i pronounce it as “ż” xddd
When I try to put my tongue to use, “l” and “ż” characters seem nowhere similar in Polish, I do understand there will be a bunch of weird rules to follow, but one of the coolest things about learning languages is to see dependencies between different elements, so I just discovered that “l” and “ż” might be related xddd
I learned from friends today that in 1984, Nutella marketed itself in Germany as being healthy
Well, no longer xddd
Our zine writing group finally managed to publish physical zines! This is the first one that the group has been producing, I’m still not in it, I should be included in the second, if things go right, but today was the celebration of the zine actually getting both a digital and physical release and they both are selling like hot buns! I really want to contribute to the second one now ^^
And one weird tangent today, I’m in a bit of an inquisitive state lately, something like a “clinging to absolutely everything in life”? xddd
So one thing I clung to recently, back when I was still in Japan, was a performer called PinkPantheress, a British singer/music producer that made it big in part thanks to a certain American figure skater, ehh xddd
Anyway though, she DOES D’N’B MUSIC. JUNGLE MUSIC. CHASE MUSIC.
I was fully convinced that we left those genres in 2005, but no, she’s bringing them back with a completely fresh sound and she does it SO COOL. Here’s my favorite song of hers that made me dig deeper into her ^^
ITS SO RARE TO FIND THAT KIND OF MUSIC RECENTLY, and almost impossible in pop, so as soon as I found her album, Fancy That, I started binging her album start to finish over and over again and I must have listened to it like at least 10 times in the last 2-3 weeks xdddd
So a week ago I actually found out tHAT ONE OF HER FINAL CONCERTS OF THE FANCY THIS TOUR IS TAKING PLACE IN BERLIN
NEXT WEEK
I was able to get a second-hand ticket for a pretty good price and OH GOD SHES SO GOOD
…so a person right in front of me had a compact camera and was recording songs and taking flash pics with it xdddd
PinkPantheress’s supporting act has been a singer named iKeda, her music also had drums and people were rocking their heads to that, so check her out if you’re interested, PinkPantheress also plugged her ^^
Very impressive show in terms of background lights and clips in the background, and of course her music is really special, from the very first song, Stateside, which also happens to be the most popular, everyone was just banging their heads left and right xddd
Since it was her third show in Berlin and the wrapping up of the Fancy That tour, she got a lot of gifts from the audience, including a very ironic pink American flag to fit her British girl aesthetic, we stan xddd
And every time a song from Fancy That was showing up, people were just screaming lungs out, this was from Girl Like Me and this song has an amazing hook for the audience where it goes like
Why aren’t you tired of the way you
LET IT ALL GO
Everyone jumped out at the same time xddd
AHHH SO GOOOD :DDDDD
Also, somebody asked her to draw their first tattoo and PinkPantheress took over the task claiming she’s not really good at drawing and drew something regardless, she wasn’t proud of it and was like “i’m okay if you dont put this as a tattoo”, but the person who she drew for was star-struck regardless xddd
and then came back for a repeated song at the end and the energy has been magical xdd
She did make jokes about Bergheim and did reminisce about the fact that the first time she came to Berlin, there were 300 people, no dancers, and it was her awkwardly standing there, and now her adventure has taken her significantly further, and we stan growth ^^
I LOVED THE CONCERT, THE ENERGY WAS WILD :DDD
And I can definitely see myself supporting her in her fourth Berlin show sometime in the future too ^^
I got my DSLR back after the concert and was able to take a grand total of two pictures xddd
Look, it’s still bright at 22:40! I wonder how it’ll be in 3 weeks ^^
I forgot to write this yesterday, so I’m gonna write it today before I forget again
I would recommend checking the “IP Man” (which is pronounced as “Yip Man”) movies (God knows how many they made) if you’re interested in this kind of movie, as they’re mostly in Chinese (and the first one might have Japanese in it if I’m not mistaken). I’m not sure if you’re into this kind of movie, but it might be something to check out :v (This is totally not propaganda ).
Also, the singer’s face somehow reminds me of Britney Spears back in the days
They mention a few names that are implied to be of noble origin in this manga and some of those sound weirdly normal in the western side of the world, like lilian or jack, i don’t know, maybe they assume that those names are fancy to be having xddd
Also, I really like this grammar, it’s very sweet how it has a っ two times over the usage of it, it kinda doesn’t look like a Japanese word if it’s structured like this ^^
A lot of today’s class was reading over pronunciation drills and trying to figure out how to pronounce specific things, and as it turns out: Chinese tongue twisters are really difficult to pronounce to people that aren’t molded in tones:
As an upside though, we were talking about how to learn Chinese language today (which are essentially my goals for this course) and there’s an app called Hello Chinese that basically looks like a reskinned version of Duolingo with really similar courses, but they do pick up on the tones in addition to just the right words and I still said in the past that I like how Duolingo is structured? I downloaded Hello Chinese, added a widget on my phone and I might be using it after the course to retain the study
Either way though, I can pronounce tone 2 and tone 3 separately pretty well now, of course when you have a sentence with tone 3, tone 2 and tone 3 right next to one another, I’ll cry and mispronounce the whole sentence, but both my ear and my mouth are slowly getting there.
We were also talking about YouTube channels that do uploads of Chinese things, and there’s one for Yo(1)Yo(1) Television Series that has episodes composed of a lot of miniepisodes that are THREE HOURS LONG PER EPISODE (WTF) xdddd
We also talked at the queer book club today about being a ninja vs being a pirate vs being a dragon, most people wanted to be ninjas and I did flex my proficiency proof from Osaka’s 新世界 that I’m the proper ninja after all ^^
Midsommar is slowly coming along! The days are getting longer, and even without buying new furniture, it’s exciting to be out when the sun it out for a bit longer ^^
Pride month has started, so we’ve had more people than usual - a new record for the group! Also, the amount of sitting space felt pretty strongly constrained and our usually-two-hour-long-intros were super condensed to make space for the Eragon slander, and wanting to be ninjas real bad C:
You can also always check out movies of known chinese actors (not the english movies, but preferably the chinese ones), such as Jackie Chan, Jet Li and there was a very famous actress whose name I forgot. There were comedy movies about Shaolin soccer (and similar movies), but blame it on the bad memory to remember their names. I also remember old movies about either kung fu or shaolin (there was a very famous one with a tiger, cobra or snake in its name) being also good and fully chinese (or at least most of it).
I’m not sure if I would still have a tongue after I attempt to read those
do you have to say “Hello” back? (what a bad, stinky joke)
Big day on WaniKani, as the remaining words on WaniKani are slowly turning to be just leeches (and there is more and more of them), the accuracy of my reviews drops, and my blocks are becoming longer, but one day I’ll definitely try to do a leech push and try to get them squeezed
It took me until halfway through the lesson to understand that “bi” and “zhi” use a completely different “i” and it sounds different too
And as a bonus, I wasn’t very confident about zhi, chi, shi and ri, so I made an exercise for the group today where I found some short words with the same tones but different syllables:
As it turns out, there are almost clean equivalents of all of those sounds at least in Polish, even though they’re not exactly the most logical on the first glance based on the latin script
ri is close to Polish “ży”, zhi is close to “dży”, shi is close to “szy”, chi is close to “czy”, bi is close to, well, “bi” and pi is close to “pi”
that realization was really big in terms of me trying to learn with a German-speaking group and knowing I have a trap card in terms of having similar sounds in Polish already, making it a bit easier for me to know it xdd
Still though, our classes are slowly turning into culture exchanges and talking about food, the role of pets and pigs in Chinese culture, rather than just learning the language, so rambling is fun, but there were times when they were talking about how the Chinese characters evolved from depictions of sun and so on and I just was clicking Hello Chinese in the background xddd
It’s weird to think that it’s only been a year since the very first Pop Mart has been opened in Germany and I was there to witness the queues, and just a year later there’s a few shops here already and they’re working on THE BIGGEST POP MART OF THE WHOLE CONTINENTAL EUROPE opening in two weeks from now
of course i’ll be there to see how it looks like xddd
Of course though, Thalia manga shop is overstocked on Boys Love, at least I’m happy that when they made this display they didn’t put up that many of them xddd
And big fun thing today
One Swiss manga artist who came in contact with manga publishers was able to get his comic published in Manga Issho and then later serialized as a separate volume! And it does look legit!
Manus came to DoKomi as well, though I didn’t have much time to meet up with people, but he made it big, congrats on being a mangaka from Switzerland xddd
Also, I got really angry today, because McDonalds caramel latte that used to be a trashy I-don’t-know-what-to-do-at-22:00-with-myself had its price raised to €4,99. It is not worth €4,99.
I was so upset that I started walking around the town and looking for prices of different drinks that are lower than McDonalds AND OF COURSE THEY ARE LOWER WHAT WERE THEY THINKING
I ended up in a cafe near the Fernsehturm and paid €4,29 for my latte, but as I was drinking it, a staff member came along and was like “we’re about to close down and we didn’t sell all of our bagels, do you want to have a bagel for free?” and I was like “yyyy OF COURSE I WANT A BAGEL FOR FREE”, so here’s the free bagel too xddd
Listening: A few announcements and dev interviews from Summer Games Live
Anime: 上伊那ぼたん、酔へる姿は百合の花第１話
Manga: 上伊那ぼたん、酔へる姿は百合の花第１〜４話
Did a mock N2 JLPT test
Manga: B’s Log Comic Vol.160
３１番目の姫様第３９話
So let’s start from the top, it always feels like a superpower if a game developer from Japan is going on stage and you can understand them before the interpreter translates their lines xddd
In a way, I wonder what amount of lines are being translated on the go, and how many are just the translator being given the script of what is about to be said, so now it’s your chance to say those words out live.
But yeah, Final Fantasy VII trilogy is finally coming to an end, damn. And Stellar Blade 2 looked unexpectedly great, speaking as a not-that-big-of-a-fan-at-all of Stellar Blade 1 ^^
Then, I finally watched anime for the first time in a while!
I also found a sampler for the manga online and tried to read it:
Overall, the anime pretty closely tracks the story of the manga, but improves on the manga SIGNIFICANTLY
The manga is a girls’ love one about this girl who really wants to get wasted and finds a lonely girl who drinks a lot but mostly alone, and then the girl who wants to be wasted really wants to be friends with the drinking girl, and the funny moments ensue from there. It’s a creative choice and I do find it interesting that the manga decided to go that way, IN JAPAN, it’ll probably not be my favorite manga/anime, but the shock value was enough to keep me going xddd
And also, I did the N2 mock on Bunpro and I’m reading much, much faster than any other time I tried to do the mock:
I did the worst on grammatical questions, as expected, and always funny considering that Bunpro is supposed to be teaching grammar and I do bad with Bunpro grammar xddd
Oh well, still, will be aiming for December, just need to remember the signup date because I most likely will have exactly one day to finish my documentation and submit it ^^
Die Anmeldung für die Prüfungen am 6. Dezenmber startet am 13. Juli.
And today’s B-Log Comic, if not for the separator from yesterday’s comic, I wouldn’t even have realized that it is supposed to be different than the previous comic, they kind of need to differentiate the stories and artstyles a bit more ^^
We’re still going at it! Today I introduced my group to the glory of popup dictionaries of Yomitan and showed them how I used it.
Because Mac has this really cool thing where you can highlight over an image and it just copies the text on it as a regular text, I kept copying different copies from the textbook into our shared notes as a group:
…and since the teacher liked them so much, we did some pronunciation practice on those sentences too, but they’re really, really hard for me today to pronounce
I wonder if Japanese was just as difficult for me to pronounce when I was starting off and I just removed those memories, or is it uniquely a Mandarin problem
Anyway, we’ve traded a lot of travel stories today, whether it’s Thailand, Vietnam, Japan or Hong Kong, and it seems like our group is slowly leaning towards more rambly environments than just hard study with examples now ^^
…so how desperate are we to wake up for a 4:43 run in Berlin in a week? I probably am not, but it’s cool that you’ll run and see the sun going up at that time C:
I said I wanted to embrace a bit more horror, this one is a little yandere-adjacent, less like がさいゆの from Mirai Nikki and more メンヘラ-adjacent, so I should be all into it, but so far I’m finding that it either doesn’t go nearly enough deep into where I’d like for it to go, or it does go TOO FAR and both can be true at the same time xddd
Chinese Corner!
I did my Hello Chinese (and already continued the streak for the 7th too), roleplayed some dialogues in Chinese today (though I immediately forget the words and tones as soon as I use them), but the biggest thing is that i went to the cinema today and saw a film today! 甜蜜蜜, or Comrades, Almost a Love Story!
Wikipedia lists it as a film in Cantonese: it’s wrong, it’s almost all in Mandarin and has some small parts of it that are in English or Cantonese.
(I actually was really upset about a dialogue line from English speakers in New York who made fun of airport coaches in New York, especially since I literally have this one right now in my Apple Wallet xdddd)
But man, WHAT A FILM. It’s so sweet and speaks so closely about loneliness and belonging and wanting to fit in a culture and never being able to do so properly, about converging, diverging, converging, diverging, it’s like if Celine Song’s Past Lives were instead called CURRENT LIVES and were trying to make the characters get together
When I was looking at the archival background photography of Hong Kong, even from the very first shot established in Kowloon, I was like OMG THATS SO COOL, there’s so many nice backgrounds, better and worse parts of living in Hong Kong, and at the end of the film the film pivots to Chinatown and Times Square in NYC in 1995 and I’m in heaven about all of this xddd
In terms of my Chinese though, I only understood a handful of words and expressions, when I heard 我不知的 in one of the emotional scenes I was like “OMG THIS COURSE IS PAYING OFF (xddd)” and that was very sweet, and man, singing in Chinese! Scenes of using tones to sing things! That was so cool!
And a lot of culture context about mainland Chinese identities, living in Hong Kong and Taiwan, I feel like I learned a lot from that movie, not in terms of the language, but in terms of self-discovery and romanticism at least ^^
Life
Let’s talk about identity then!
I did mention this place in Berlin, the Russisches Haus in one of my entries before, but I didn’t go there then. This is a Russian cultural centrum, sponsored by the Russian government and has a really fancy bookstore right in front of it.
For historical reasons, Russian language is like the fifth most common language you’ll probably hear on the streets of Berlin, after German, English, Arabic and Turkish, there’s a lot of minority communities here, so the center is becoming ever so popular.
BUT JUST LOOK AT IT
THEY HAVE SO MANY BOOKS AND MANGAS
Two really cool things, some of the books in Russian are released as special edition hardcovers when they’re not available as such in other languages, and this bookstore is pretty affordable too!
It’s not something I talk about often, but at school, this was not that long after the fall of the soviet block, the most foreign language teachers were still teaching Russian, and not English, so I was made to have a Russian course between grade 4 and 6. xddd
I forgot almost all of it and didn’t actually use it in person much…
…or so i thought, because as I started flipping through the pages, I realized that I understand A LOT. I mean, A LOT of it, with some expressions actually being able to understand every single word. And my reading speed wasn’t that much slower than my Japanese reading speed either
As I was reading this, I was really excited, and in a single seating I finished my first reading thing in Russian in like, 15 years! It took me less than two hours, and after that I was like “HAAA”, it turns out that learning Japanese to be able to decrypt the sentences even if you don’t understand every single word is carrying into other languages too ^^
It’s not every day that you wake up and you go like “OH SHIT I ACCIDENTALLY UNLOCKED MY FIFTH LANGUAGE DLC, HAAAA :DDDD”
But as the day went on, I started feeling a bit of this existential “hmmm” about learning and using Russian. Because I remember that not speaking Russian was not just a decision I’ve made because I was tired of the language, it was a political decision that a middle school me has made, and has been sticking to it since.
There are so many mini-communities in Berlin that are conflicted about this even more than I am - Belarussian people whose first language is Russian and they don’t want to use Russian at all because of Kremlin, eastern-Ukrainian families torn apart because of the war, but it’s lingua franca, a lot of people are using Russian to be able to understand one another.
So I don’t know, it felt exciting to wake up to a perspective of having another A2-B1 language I can just pull out at any time and start reading native content in it and be able to smile as I do so, but my relationship to Russian language might have not healed - it is in the best spot it’s ever been in though?
So yeah, languages. what a concept.
I used six languages today, all for at least a few sentences.
The photos are also great 
so I thought it was weird she didn’t connect the dots on the topic she had just been speaking about. I felt like she wanted to eat her avocado in peace)
xddd
