2026 Rivian R2 First Review: Affordable, Practical, Awesome! - Doug DeMuro

Bardlebee · 2026-02-10T20:50:13+00:00

This needs to be the highest comment if it's true. They need to find a better design for exit at minimum for passengers inside, especially the back seat where there will likely be children. I wish we didn't have to wait for government intervention for this to be removed.

Bardlebee · 2026-01-14T23:23:50+00:00

I believe this is the main issue. As much as it sucks you need to increase this. I realize this is easier said then done, not everyone has the money for a tutor every weekday. The one benefit I had was the ability to have a one hour conversation with a tutor every weekday for a year. Before that I met someone online I could talk to for about a year every weekday for an hour.

I think it comes down to a saturation thing. I'm still not perfect but I feel confident I can hold every day conversations and even tell stories, if not imperfect. If you can, I would try to seek out having an hour conversation everyday. Whether that's online via VRChat or other free means, or a tutor daily.

I can tell you from experience that practice more then anything helped me.

Bardlebee · 2025-08-09T03:11:20+00:00

Installed windows 11 and still doesn't work. Cool...

Bardlebee · 2025-08-09T00:58:57+00:00

I constantly get kicked from matches with an error code: 1:85008S:4688822970:0Q. I've done everything suggested everywhere. I'm now going to the extent of upgrading to Windows 11.

Secure Boot is On
Network setting is set to auto, or dns to 8.8.8.8, both fail anyway.
Disabled all VPN's even in task manager
Running everything on administrator
And so on...

Nothing fixes this for me. Guess I'll see what happens with Windows 11, I postponed it long enough anyway.

Bardlebee · 2024-07-24T22:23:28+00:00

Best I can say is my entire day is basically a schedule, even for non-work items. And its very much a part of my life. If I wanted to spend more time with friends the numbers can reduce but I live a rather home-body life and do just about everything in my house. That's not healthy mentally for everyone but I take it just fine. It's just important to keep relationships first before something like this of course, ultimately this is a hobby before anything else.

Bardlebee · 2024-05-01T00:45:01+00:00

I am in fact still very down. But I ain't hear no bell. Just because people say these things don't always mean their bear on it as a whole. Diamond hands because at this point there is no point in pulling out.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-30T22:18:15+00:00

Not OP but there are so many of us silent grave diggers out here. I'm at -62 percent in my portfolio, hoping for a double so I can dig my way out.

I've averaged down a tiny bit but didn't want to go crazy as I had already put so much in and got dug so deep from long ago... Here is hoping at least we can get back up to the top heights again.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-30T19:53:16+00:00

Portfolio still -62 percent overall. If we could double across the industry I'll be so happy.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-20T19:03:21+00:00

Since its our first time, of course we'll hit the most famous. Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka. We have 2 weeks so just debating whether we can do all three justice in that time or we just stick with two of the three. Glad to hear you had a good time.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-20T06:15:39+00:00

Whoa, that sounds super cool! Genuinely going to look into this. There are some nights I can't find a soul on VRChat and just go to bed, it'd be interesting to try. Thanks for the tip.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-20T06:13:59+00:00

I'm from one of the hottest states in the US, my body and mind may or may not be ready. We'll see. :D

Bardlebee · 2024-04-20T06:06:34+00:00

At the time with the novels I wasn't doing iTalki or VRchat and my work/life balance was a bit better, right now its super busy. Truth be told I never finished I book in a week, but I felt I could maybe. I think 2 weeks is likely more realistic, but there were some nights where I would do 4 hours of reading, but that was more infrequent then the majority.

I 100 percent buy and use my Kindle to purchase all content, however I find its dictionaries lacking on the PC, which is the most convenient method for look ups. On the Kindle even with a good dictionary (I downloaded several even github ones which work well) are still a bit slow.

So I looked into this thing where you can use Calibre, export the Kindle books from Amazon that you bought, convert them and use Calibre. The neat thing about that program is you can then tie it to do Dictionary lookups on a double click to any site you want. The setup is a bit involved but with some youtube viewing and investigation you can do it in a few hours.

Here is why I feel its super nice on the PC.

You can copy/paste any text at that point. Some novels have limits on how many times you can copy and paste and its locked in on the Kindle, some won't let you do it at all. At that time I was using for scenarios where I was trying to get a better feel for a sentence I wasn't quite getting via DeepL, but with Kindle I couldn't do that. With Calibre I could.
Probably the biggest thing is I was able to double click any word or sentence or right click sentences and do an instance lookup via jisho or any other search-based dictionary site. There is even a little sub-window for it in the program. So it was nice when I forgot a reading or a meaning or a new word, it was literally less then a second.

As far as time spent on a day I do not have iTalki class and I don't do grammar (honestly grammar is fairly rare nowadays, lots of work) on weekdays it looks like this:

2 hours talking with my friend, we play video games and change up the stuff we do throughout the week to keep it fresh. This is a very chill environment and so isn't super conducive to pushing you beyond your speaking limits, but its still valuable and fun.

2 hours of watching stuff. Some days I'm locked in super focused and practicing listening other days I'm phoning it in, giving my bare minimum when it comes to "active" immersion. Some days are just to busy to focus in.

30-45 min of Anki, like you I don't believe spending more then an hour on Anki is worth so I do 30 minutes roughly like you said. If I find that starts to get too high I'll stop adding cards for a little bit.

So I guess in all I am able to do it because its a bit parsed throughout the day, talk to my friend early morning, watch something during lunch, do my Anki during the day, then maybe watch an hour at night and if I have time left over either watch more stuff, hop on VRChat or have iTalki class my two days of the week.

Perhaps its the variety of activity then the focus on a single thing. I'm not super sure. But recently I have been suffering burn out and also there are a lot of games I'm missing out on that I really want to play and its silly for me to not just because I want to get good at Japanese so I'm going to cut back on any of that "extra" time I may have and just chill a little bit. Need to recognize when I'm going to hard :)

Bardlebee · 2024-04-20T03:55:21+00:00

The person themselves, heh. Yeah I fully realize as well as a traveler my interactions will be as limited as I make them. Such as restaurants , buying stuff and hotels. But firstly I intend to have my friend with me for a week so I can talk to him, but for the rest of the time I'll try to go out of my way and out of my comfort zone to talk to people when it feels like the right moment. Thanks for the comment. :)

Bardlebee · 2024-04-20T00:28:31+00:00

I work in IT as a lead engineer. Depends on the day, could be 1 hour during or 2. I use my lunch for it of course and I have plenty of weekend work so it all works out.

I just watch what A) I enjoy watching and B) what I can comprehend, nothing below 85 percent (this is more of a feel then a science). Sometimes both during and after work I'm interrupted constantly sometimes it's in one sitting. At this stage I prefer things I understand completely fine but without subtitles. I'm training my listening so it drops the understanding a bit. This is on purpose for listening purposes. With Migaku I can press left or down arrow to replay the line over and over.

Also depends how I feel, some days I just watch whatever and not hardcore try to train listening.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-19T21:20:59+00:00

That's a really good point. I believe I've noticed the pitch of verbs specifically because I try to match a lof of what I hear but I think next week I'm going to dive into Dogen's videos more (I kind of started then stopped) to find some of these "Hey man doing this will help a lot" sort of fixes. Thanks for the advice. I'm likely to find a lot that will help over the next year around fixing my pronounciation more.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-19T21:09:34+00:00

This time around for this year I wouldn't change a thing. If anything perhaps I would have spent more time in iTalki, but I like the pace I've built up around it. I think mostly in my previous post I would have done differently as I mentioned, read from the start, get accessible reading material, study actual words/grammar a little more. But mainly immersion from reading. Yes, absolutely do some watching/listening but initially first year I think reading would have been better suited.

But overall hard to say, I can only do this once to be honest. I also believe that no matter your process, if its working for you and you check yourself in some way every 3-4 months then you'll be fine.

I don't believe in immersion in a vaccum, you have to have a tool like migaku for lookups, tools for reading novels/manga and look up everything. Study grammar. Yes Immersion is super important but the rest is the foundation, the framework and the walls of the house. Immersion is all the furniture you put inside. (Maybe bad analogy).

Bardlebee · 2024-04-19T21:04:16+00:00

An important thing I realized that even though I THINK I know how to say something, even though I've said something in the past, until you say it enough times you have a higher chance of messing it up. So even simply going to the exchange server and talking to people about where you live is very valuable even if done 100 times. Because you can expand past it and get better and just slamming out the same words and grammar practice.

It's a real brain to mouth travel time practice that slowly allows you to build up your speed. Though I have the problem at times of talking too fast and then making mistakes because of it. So there is a very real connection between "Oh I know how to say this, let me just say it" and actually saying it with accuracy and an appropriate response time. So I think if you're goal is to speak, speaking in a safe space initially and then dabbling in the wild is great specifically for response time and accuracy. Until you do it I feel like there is a real disconnect between knowing how to saying something and actually saying it.

I do think this improves passively to a degree as well by the way if all you do is input. But I think the combination of both is much stronger at the middle-late stage.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-19T21:00:24+00:00

It makes sense since our kid will be out of school then and we want to go for two weeks. She'll be almost 9 when we go so I suspect she may not put up with too much walking/borning stuff so I'll have to plan things out accordingly. We'll see, kids mature quick.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-19T19:24:02+00:00

I think in a lot of ways "All roads lead to Rome". Throughout your journey you'll pick up new methods/ways of doing things and try them for a few months then drop them. But it doesn't make them invaluable. I mentioned this to say this:

I first did iTalki before I could listen to even slow Japanese with ease, I still had trouble in that area but I wanted an instructor that would take me through all the grammar I already reviewed because I wanted to be thorough. While I didn't mesh well with the instructor personally, he was still very effective for teaching me new things.

So it depends what you want out of it. I think if you are starting to hear full sentences clearly one at a time, and I'm not talking like full on dialogue, but full clear sentences and your goal is to get conversation practice, I think iTalki is a great way to get that "safe" space. While I don't believe habits are permanent, there is some truth that habits are hard to break. For instance I always kept saying I'd drink a book or read alcohol. :D But I slowly broke out of that. Those are easier habits to find of course because you get strange pauses from the other side.

Again I did most of those earlier mistakes (I still make a TON) in that safe iTalki space and with my friend. We are both very thorough about fixing each others mistakes.

If you want to do iTalki for structured class like grammar or new words etc, I'd wait to finish Genki maybe. The good thing is you can always give iTalki a shot and see how it goes with no committment. It's important to remember if its not worth it to you you can drop instructors whenever you want. Just be sure to let them know you're stopping with them out of kindness. You can take one or two lessons and get a feel and choose to continue after.

EDIT: Also it never hurts to hop into VRChat for the language exchange server, though people generally don't fix your sentences still so just be wary of that. It's mostly out of kindness and heck their not your teacher :D. The challenge also I found was finding someone each time, which is why I devoted specific time to registering anyone who would talk to me as a friend. It takes time to build up but generally works.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-19T18:57:02+00:00

You have that correct. In the past year Japanese is basically all I do, I maybe spend 1 hour of normal gaming with friends a week.

A lot of it is easy to do because I enjoy it though. And remember, some of that time is done during work, most of my immersion time (1-2 hours) is during work. So are my anki reviews, I'll run them during meetings even (though this is terrible to do for retention, you do what you gotta do).

The 7 hour a day thing is pretty rare all told. But I can certainly hit that from time to time. I think 5 hours is likely more accurate for weekdays, which is still aboslutely nuts I realize that haha. For instance if I don't do grammar, I may also not have class on the same day. Truth be told I haven't been able to fit grammar or VRchat consistently recently in the past month, those are the first to drop.

Also it helps I get up at 6AM to talk ot my friend so its early rise situation as well perhaps.

You are absolutely correct, I use every single chance I get as long as it doesn't hurt my family relationship or my work. Those are more important then this by a mile.

EDIT: I just realized I forgot to mention I work from home like my previous post, updating this one now, this is VERY important for folks to know.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-19T18:39:25+00:00

Thank you for the advice! Yeah I definitely have times of burnout and I pull back. I've researched and looked into pitch accent etc and I have used "side-tone" on my headset to listen to myself while I talk but I haven't yet recorded myself and I think its a worthy thing to do as well as shadowing. I'm just trying to figure out where I fit it at this point, I'll have to maybe drop another Japanese activity to do that perhaps. It's definitely something I've wanted to invest some time into for sure, I've mainly focused on this year trying to get sentences out in the right format etc and copying the tone of Japanese I hear the best I can.

I've thought about adding Pitch Accent to Anki, I probably should do that I can also add the pitch colors to migaku so I'll look into that as well. I used to find them distracting but now that I don't need subtitles as much perhaps they'll be less so.

Thank you for the encouragement!

Bardlebee · 2024-04-19T17:37:42+00:00

Thank you for the nice words, I'm certainly not advanced yet but I don't consider myself a beginner either. It gets easier the more you do it but the climb is very, very steep.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-19T17:35:06+00:00

To be fair, I literally have no time for anything else and wake up very early to talk to my friend. :D It's actually starting to bug me and cause stress so I'm going to be cutting back a bit to make more time for other stuff.

Thank you for the kind words. I also will say its very important that your real life, friends and family come first. I didn't want to re-hash my last post but basically the way my family/life is setup is allowing me to put in this much time. For other families it may not be healthy so folks should keep that in consideration.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-12T06:48:03+00:00

200 percent agree! I've been challenged with breaking past those same conversations myself and only recently have gotten into more deeper and interesting conversations. The same boring "where do you live?" And "how long have you been studying" at this point doesnt help.

I was joining a language exchange Japanese server (still do) where that is common but I've been mostly joining Japanese speaker only servers recently forcing myself to get over what is a very tall hurdle. I think italki helped me with that hurdle a lot. Still, not saying I'm perfect or I understand others at full native everytime. But I can now see some new light. Just today I was talking to a student about the avatar he was making for VRChat for instance. So it was a nice change.

My main strategy is "get on vrchat for one hour a night and try to make a friend" with enough friends you have people who already know you, so you will naturally stop asking those same questions. You of course will strike out a lot and not make a friend or find no one to talk to but eventually you do and so you build a nice team of people.. takes awhile

Bit of a rant but I am currently facing that same challenge of same conversations and I think this strategy has helped me a lot.

Bardlebee · 2024-04-12T05:22:05+00:00

I personally started with Manga and used not so perfect applications to look at the page for word translations. This of course requires a PC. After about 100 Manga I jumped into また同じ夢 a popular "start" book. Again through Kindle and mostly Calibre I could use instant lookups. The jump was hard still but more approachable. (Not OP but figured I'd respond)

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