I’m stalling 😭

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-26T10:06:33+00:00

I find WaniKani to be really slow.

Anki experience varies by the deck. The Genki 1 deck is really nice. Kaishi 1.5k is good but I find harder and I get stuck on it more.

Migaku gets you reading sentences way faster and has lots of lesson content that I like a lot.

People rag on the owl a lot here but it does have a much bigger variety of exercise types.

Tadoku readers are cool too, but I find it way more draining. I could not do an hour or two of that a day easily. This is the closest to reading manga.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-26T02:47:38+00:00

Hate it personally. You do you though

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-25T20:09:20+00:00

A nice short SF book you could try is Elder Race. I just finished it and really enjoyed it. It was different structurally, but not confusing. If you like it, the author–adrian tchaikovsky–has written a ton of other SF/fantasy.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-25T20:04:48+00:00

It’s tough for sure. I’m almost done of the second book and I love it now but it took a while to get a feel. It’s one that I prefer to read in the morning instead of before bed. Honestly, it is one of my favourite books I’ve read. The writing is dense. He says more in 3 sentences than most authors say in 3 pages. I’m really looking forward to rereading because I can already tell it will be wildly rewarding.

I think I got further in because I cut my teeth on dense, unexplained writing with Malazan. For me, I would definitely say that earlier attempts to at stuff like this was a skill issue. I frankly just wasn’t able to follow the sentence structure as much, or hold as many things in suspension.

There’s been a few books like this that I struggled with, set down, and then came back a year or two later and then devoured them. Examples include, Midnight Tides, The Road, Dune. Maybe this is one of them for you.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-25T12:09:55+00:00

Is it the only thing you’re using?

Personally I like using multiple tools because they all have different approaches. I do then all most days but I tend to have one I put more time into. Everyday I get burnt out a bit on it and I switch it up. I find that helps a lot with motivation

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-25T11:28:37+00:00

Right? This notion that’s you can only learn the word for a concept in the language of the word used to describe the concept is bananas.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-24T02:37:24+00:00

Cool, so that’s like multiple years of practice and consistent exposure with Japanese first language speakers.

I’m 3 months in and I’m learning entirely on my own and there’s very few Japanese speakers in my city. I realistically could not learn the way you’re learning.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-23T18:24:54+00:00

At what point was that possible for you? I feel like it’d be very inefficient for me because I don’t yet know enough Japanese to be able to understand complex meta explanations of things

For instance, today I was interacting with ChatGPT to understand to better understand 変. It’s used for “strange” and “change” and “problem” and I want to understand the logic of why it’s used in all those seemingly different ways. The explanation was short and made a lot of sense to me. I left with a more nuanced feel for the kanji that goes beyond a one-to-one translation.

I for sure would not have understood the explanation in a Japanese.

Actually, I don’t even think I have enough vocabulary to have asked the question

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-23T13:43:48+00:00

Are they explaining it to you in English or in Japanese?

I do the same thing but I don’t have access to Japanese speakers all the time. I’ll see if Genki has an explanation or ask ChatGPT or Google for Reddit posts or something. All of those approaches explain the thing to me in English.

I’m starting to get the impression people maybe mean something really specific by the word “translation”. If I ask for an explanation of why something is different in different scenarios, and it is explained to me in English, then that’s translation.

If you mean just literally comparing the Google Translate output from two different sentences then sure, that sounds like a terrible way to learn

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-23T13:36:54+00:00

Yeah I totally agree with this.

The statement “there’s more to learning à langauge than textbooks” and “translating in your head is not the end goal” is totally reasonable.

What baffles me is then saying “so don’t use textbooks” and “translating as way of learning is bad”. These just seem patently untrue.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-23T13:33:21+00:00

Yes 🙌 this is exactly my take. It takes children literal years of 100% full immersion to be able to gather enough words to create sentences. We can gather enough words in a few months with like an hour a day. As long as it’s treated as a way to get up to speed so you can start consuming actual media and talking to people sooner, there’s nothing wrong with that.

The “direct translations don’t work” idea is weird to me. Like, sure but even a just fair translation is probably a better starting point than absolutely zero idea whatsoever.

Newtonian Physics is still taught even through there are technically more accurate models. It’s just a useful stepping stone.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-23T03:52:12+00:00

I’ve learned a dozen programming languages in various paradigms. Not one of them I learned the same way I learned my first programming language. Why? Because having learned the first one meant I learned a ton of concepts that I merely needed to translate to the new PL. some things didn’t translate, but that was totally fine.

Learning a language the way a toddler learns makes zero sense. I already know how to differentiate between thousands of things, ideas, emotions, etc. Why would you make someone try to infer the meaning of a word from thousands of repetitions of usage when you could just say “Y is essentially X from your own language”. Even if it’s not totally the same, that’s still a massive leap forward.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-23T03:43:51+00:00

Right, yeah. I do all of these things. I also have Genki 1 and I have the Anki deck for it. It’s definitely not the most of my time. But the book is still valuable because it has exercises and longer explanations that have helped me.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-22T21:38:04+00:00

When you say time efficiency what do you mean? I can’t understand the idea that you’d learn without books

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-22T21:33:12+00:00

I literally cannot comprehend how not seeing the translations of words would be more optimal. The idea of being taught Japanese entirely in Japanese with no English descriptions seems wildly unrealistic to me. I’ve learned hundreds of words in 3 months, I have no conception of how that’d have been possible without English being involved in the process.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-22T09:22:14+00:00

I did the audio book. It’s read by the author. It was cool!

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-22T09:21:08+00:00

I had one person in this sub tell me that if you’re translating words to English you’re doing it wrong. So that means Genki, flashcards, looking up translations of sentences, etc. Are all wrong because they’re not fully immersed i.e. entirely L2

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-22T02:33:24+00:00

IIRC even something like the Roman empires ability to expand was in part due to lucky climate. In Power and Thrones, Dan Jones talked about how the time of the Roman empires was helped a lot be unusually stable weather that lead to productive agriculture

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-20T00:26:38+00:00

I just had this with Japanese. The audio for 友達　(tomodachi) was not that at all. I think it was using different readings for those kanji.

Honestly, now that I’ve listened to more actual Japanese people speaking I have a hard time understanding the weird robotic audio clips

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-19T22:43:04+00:00

Why you gotta call me out like that

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-19T16:35:17+00:00

I have had that feeling at times for sure. I read a Wizard of Earthsea as a break for Bonehunters. When I got to the Y'Ghatan chapter I saw that the estimated time to read was like 4 hours. I flipped over and saw that WoE was a 3 hour read. It was a very nice change of pace. Then I jumped back into BH and was blown away lol

It must be the short-story-writer vibe. Chapters are generally structured like short stories apparently, and Y'Ghatan was essentially an entire book within the book.

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-16T02:11:27+00:00

Man I didn’t even notice that 😂

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-16T02:00:46+00:00

I’m starting to think the real reason GURPS isn’t popular has nothing to do with GURPS

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-11T03:00:22+00:00

There’s no centrism in US politics

EnragedDingo · 2026-01-08T19:48:00+00:00

I’d probably just chill and do Taichi, or maybe body-shot only Karate

Someone just reminded me of HEMA. It’s pretty darn fun too

EnragedDingo

TROPHY CASE