Japanese in one year?! - Not your usual study log

Yes, I just installed the recommended ones.

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That’s fine. It should become apparent very quickly what you’ll actually use and if there’s something that you’re missing.

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I personally use Jitendix, I haven’t tried any others, but I think it’s very good :slight_smile:

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Alright, it’s been a while since my last proper update, so here we go! This one’s quite long, so if you plan to read everything at once, prepare some snacks and drinks :wink:


Japanese

Let’s start with the main topic, of course, namely my progress in Japanese! Just a quick recap so that we’re all on the same page: About a month ago or so, the time that I can spend on Japanese was cut down to two hours. As a result, my routine got pretty tripped up.

However, I now pretty much fully “recovered” from that and am back again! So, how does my new schedule look like for Japanese?

Currently, I try to do all WaniKani reviews every day and also do 10 - 15 lessons consistently. Consistency is very important for me because (regarding motivation at least) if I only do it like every other day, I find it much harder to do that instead of doing it every day. I realized this on level 22: Due to handling lessons pretty inconsistently during almost the whole level, it took me more than a month, but I’d like to keep it below 14 days in the future.

Then for Bunpro… well, I guess I wasn’t really consistent there either with my reviews :joy: I didn’t do any reviews there for one or two weeks and, as a result, had 300+ reviews there, but I’m slowly making the tower smaller again, I’m currently at 200 reviews.

Reading is also slowly making its way into my schedule again, I’ve managed to read a few NHK articles again in the last week, which is a pretty good thing because currently, it’s my only source of reading. And the same can also be said about listening.

However (and I’m pinging @Soggyboy here), my parents allowed me to play with my Nintendo 3DS during summer, starting next week, which means I can do what I planned a few months ago already: Play through Mario & Luigi: Dream Team Bros, but in 日本語! :smile: I will try to share a few pictures, but I can’t promise anything. However, I will definitely write about it.

So what did I not manage to do? Well, iKnow! has been pretty much on ice since my time cut, and I don’t think I’ll be able to get it back into my schedule anytime soon. The same is, unfortunately, true for writing.

So, what does my daily checklist for Japanese currently look like? This is what I have:

  • All WK reviews every day
  • 10 - 15 WK lessons every day unless all are done
  • At least 30 reviews on Bunpro every day until I’m back to 0
  • Listen to one episode of Nihongo con Teppei
  • Read one or two NHK (not necessarily easy) articles
  • During summer: Play at least one hour of Dream Team Bros. in 日本語

It’s relatively small, but not too bad. Of course, if I can get more done, I will do so hehe

And to conclude this first section: I haven’t forgotten about また、同じ夢を見ていた! The problem is that I haven’t got the book yet, but I’ll try to get it somewhere.

(Also, I will add stats later when I’m on Windows again, as I don’t have all stats on Linux)


Programming

As you might know, the last time I updated my progress here was that I was at the beginning of the CS50x course (which is basically what Harvard calls CS50). I’m almost at the end now, at week 8 from 11 (weeks are zero indexed). I’ll take a bit more time for this week since it introduces three programming languages - of which only one is completely new though, namely JavaScript. I’ve already started learning HTML and CSS once, but at some point dropped it. However, it seems like I still knew most of them… and let’s be honest, there’s not soooo much that we have to learn, compared to JavaScript, right? I could definitely write anything in HTML and CSS as long as I have a cheat sheet with what tags and the like are available.

JavaScript is a completely different story, though. As it is a proper programming language, it, of course, has a lot more features than markup languages, which means it takes more time. I’m not sure if I like it or not tbh, but we’ll see. And I also revised SQL in week 7, as I had already once learned it pretty well.

I’ve also tried a bit through other programming languages as well - C#, asm, C++ - and while I all liked them (especially asm), C turned out to be the programming language I enjoy the most. Even though handling memory safe can often be very difficult, I just like how it looks and feels, if that makes sense.

Which is a great thing, because I decided that, for the purpose of education, write my own operating system, and C (and asm) seems to be the best (and one of the few) choices when writing the kernel. However, writing an OS is something for a very skilled person, and since I’m not that good yet, I’ll work on general programming, with focus on C, first before trying to conquer this challenge!

And operating systems bring us straight to the next section: Linux!


Linux

Some of you may know this already, but I attempted to dual boot my Laptop with Windows 11 and Linux (I use Arch btw) - and succeeded!

While I encountered a few problems while trying to boot into Linux, I managed to solve them rather quickly and haven’t had any in the last week. I currently use Arch with Xfce, plan on switching to i3 though, as soon as I’ve finished setting it up. This might take a while, which is the reason I’m using Xfce in the meanwhile. i3’s documentation is insanely good, though - which I guess was their intention lol. I had considered dwm as well, but I don’t really like the 2000 lines limit, which i3 doesn’t have.

I’ve already set up vscode on Linux as well, and I’m not sure if it’s just me, but it feels like there are a lot more custom themes and styles to choose from.

I also decided to go through the Linux from Scratch (short LFS) book to make my very own Linux distro (I guess I can call it my own distro then?), but probably not to use it, but rather for educational purposes, and for simplicity, I’ll take a few GB away from my disk just to make it bootable and perhaps some really basic GUI. I think 10 should work, as I don’t even have 10GB on my Arch partition yet, despite the fact that I already have quite a lot programs like vscode or gimp and the like. And after all, I only do this for educational purposes, not to use it.

What I will try, however, is Gentoo, just out of curiosity. I’ve heard that the compilation times aren’t too bad when you do it on an actual device rather than a virtual machine, but also that they can be very long. The best thing is to try it yourself, I guess, so want to give it a shot. I don’t think I will use it as my daily driver, since I’m very happy with Arch, but why shouldn’t I try it? :smile: I’m sure I can spare 15 - 20 GB somewhere for trying it out.

Another thing worth mentioning is that I like to keep everything as minimal as possible, so if I see a way to avoid using a program without too much trouble, I’ll do it. This is most noticable when I boot into Linux, as my login screen is the virtual terminal (iirc also referred to as tty), and then I manually start my GUI without having to use any display manager. The booting time is a loooot faster this way!


I tried to keep this as short as possible, since quite a lot happened. I might be finished with the CS50 couse (except for final project) by the next time I post an update, and I will probably also have started my Japanese game journey as well.

Well, anyway, see ya around :3

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I’ve looked around a bit, and I think these games are region locked so you need the Japanese versions to play them in Japanese. There may be hacks out there to remove the region locks on the 3ds system itself, but I think you would still need the Japanese game. But if you can get the Japanese game this would definitely be super fun. I’ve watched almost all of the playthrough for the first game and now I want to play them myself :grinning:

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But can’t I just set the language of my console to be Japanese, and all games will be Japanese as well? I’ve never tried changing the language, so I’m not sure. Also, is there a difference between using a cartrigde and downloading the game from the eshop regarding the language settings?

It is very fun! I’ve played Superstar Saga as well (but in German), and while it was quite short, it was still a fun game :smile: If my idea of switching the device’s language doesn’t work, I’ll try to get the Japanese version somewhere!

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I think this depends on the version you have. It looks like the European version “supports eight different languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Russian.” I don’t think you’d be able to play in Japanese on the version you have.


This will depend on the region you’re using for the eShop. You can’t buy any new games on the eShop, in any case, so you’d have to buy a physical cartridge if setting the system language to Japanese doesn’t work.

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You would be surprised. CSS has grown a lot throughout the years. CSS variables and selector specificity, flexbox and grid, the box model, stacking contexts, animation, nesting, how it interacts with screen readers, what all the different types of text alignment means… Not to mention legacy stuff you might run into like clearfix and float based layouts.

But hey, at least a columnar layout is easy these days

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Well, I guess all I can do is try, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll just try to get the Japanese version somewhere.

Ok, perhaps there’s a bit more to CSS than I first thought :sweat_smile: I do think that it is still less to learn than JavaScript though.

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I find that it’s easy to get started with HTML and CSS, but there’s actually quite a bit to learn to make modern websites that have good support across devices and browsers. It’s an art form, I think. While you’re technically just formatting the page, you still need to have good problem-solving skills and an awareness of best practices and current technologies.

Yes, there’s a lot to learn with JavaScript. You’d probably be comfortable with a lot of it because you have some experience with Python and C now. Even then, it’s fairly common to use JavaScript frameworks on larger projects, so you might have to learn more than just the base language, depending on the context. I also get confused when I look at modern JavaScript because it’s changed a lot over the years and I never kept up with all the asynchronous features and things like Promises. Such features are pretty important for modern websites, but I think they take some time and practice to fully understand and to use correctly.

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I’m still unsure about how much I like JavaScript, but I guess this is something I should get a bit more familiar with, since it’s the most used programming language. Btw, is there any other case than making a website where you can use JavaScript?

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JavaScript is used mostly for websites. You could also use it for other applications (on your computer, without a browser), though, through a runtime environment like Node.js. Also, I’ll note that some of the desktop (and mobile) apps you use every day are probably built with JavaScript using frameworks like Electron. Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Discord are just a few examples of programs that use web technologies behind the scenes. For example, Visual Studio Code is written mostly in TypeScript, which adds types to JavaScript.

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So I can use JavaScript on it’s own as well with Node.js? This sounds great and would be very useful because when I learn a new language, I mostly just want to write code in that language, but currently, everytime I want to write something in JavaScript, I also have to write something in HTML, and then I have to include ids and events and that stuff, and half of the code that I write is HTML, even though all I wanted was testing something in JavaScript. This can get annoying pretty quickly, especially because it’s more likely that you’ll mess up somewhere because you have to write more code in other languages.

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Yes, that’s right. I’d still recommend learning to use it in the context of HTML and CSS, though, because that’s where it really shines. You can certainly use it without making a website, though. Personally, I don’t really see a compelling reason to use JavaScript on its own, but that’s only because I’m already familiar with other languages and it has some quirks that would annoy me.

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I don’t plan to use it on it’s own, I just want to do it for now to get more comfortable with the language more quickly. Of course, I can’t and won’t igore its very close relation to HTML and CSS, but for now, I only want to focus on JavaScript alone, because it’s the only language from these three that is completely new to me :slight_smile:

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For me, I learned Javascript before Python so it’s become my de facto scripting language I use when I just need to throw together a quick tool or program (using Bun, which is similar to Node, but better). I also use it for running a swear jar discord bot I made for my class through the Discord.js framework (for pretty much the same reason listed above).

But I say just use what you feel more comfortable with, there are a thousand options to do what python or javascript do as scripting languages, and it doesn’t really matter which one you use.

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Unfortunately, 3DS games are region locked, so if the game you want to play is not an old DS one, buying the Japanese cartridge won’t help you much. If you have a cartridge you bought from Media Markt or Müller take a look at the code at the bottom of the game art under the big CE and you’ll see a code that ends with EUR that is the region lock marker.
However, there is a legit way to play in Japanese on a 3DS if you can find new/second hand cartridges of some games from a very short list of games where Japanese is one of the languages available in-game Like bravely default which I have. All you need to do is go to the game setting and choose which language you prefer for speech and for text, so it can be a mix of two or just one for both. It has nothing to do with the system language of choice (which automatically changes the language of most games you play).

Weirdest thing ever, I was looking for my old 3DS for a while so I could find the lost Bravely Default cartridge and transfer my Nintendo ID to the one I use and download Yo Kai watch again (for german because EUR) and play the Bravely Default in Japanese on the old one, and while rummaging through the storage bins My old HTML and CSS book popped out… decades old book…

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My thought is the languages are just syntax specifications and IDE support, but it’s also dependent on the runtime or the compile target they would actually use.

Say, JavaScript syntax will have those weirdness, and runtime would be the event loop. Also historically, it was used first on the web.

I like TypeScript, but I can’t deny it will weaken into JavaScript sometimes. Also the transpile target is still JavaScript. (Otherwise, JavaScript with JSDoc.)

I don’t really run into problems with it (though rarely). Other languages have their own weirdness. But in the end, I just use whatever works.

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How do you know where I got my games from lol (I indeed got most of them, if not all, from Media Markt). Anyway, I had a look and you’re right

Since it doesn’t seem to be on the list you linked as well, I guess I’ll have to find a … not so legit way :eyes:

I’ve talked about HTML and CSS just yesterday, is that coincidence or destiny? :joy:

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Oh, and before I forget: Here are the stats for WK (nothing really interesting happened on Bunpro)

WaniKani






(RIP consistency)

(I didn’t update this chart very frequently)

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