Week 1506

At the risk of being yet another Claude hypeman, I have been using Claude… A lot. If memory serves from my last update (I don’t read the previous week after I write it, I’m sorry), I initially was using it to construct passages to read based on my Wanikani vocabulary. 

Well, I decided to take it a step further and partner with it on creating a plan to get to the N3 level this year. This would refine my focus pretty significantly for the year. 

It would mean that I don’t just prioritize my bulk late this year and means that I don’t ever put dog training at the front of my to do list. 

Taking care of the dogs is a constant and so is lifting so I think this will be fine - it just means less variation in what I am doing this year. We will see how I am able to keep my focus. 

With that, we have a plan to leverage Wanikani, Bunpro, immersion (dominantly anime and Harry Potter in Japanese on audible), and maybe Linqg. I like Lingq but am trying to cut down on subscriptions. Wanikani has been a lifetime membership for years and depending on Bunpro usage, I may just do that. If Lingq offered lifetime, I would have upgraded to that last year - but alas - another company using ongoing support to justify not offering a lifetime tier. 

The focus of this past week was to knock out my Wanikani queue. I have been on the same level for almost 1000 days. My queue was as high as 900 at one point and I finally got it down to 0 last week.

Do as I say, not as I do, and don’t do that to yourself - clawing out of that pit was not nearly as fun as breezing through lessons daily. 

For those in the know, this probably isn’t a super efficient use of my time if my core goal is to be fluent as quickly as possible. I am trying to use the resources at my disposal to do this and trying to minimize that hating my life portion of learning the language.

Having used Wanikani, I don’t like Anki’s interface - it’s not nearly as intuitive. I’d rather just push through the not random random order of Wanikani than suffer through using Anki. 

I am leveraging Bunpro to familiarize myself with grammatical concepts. Candidly, I hate learning grammar. I don’t understand English grammar so I am torn on why I would try to understand Japanese grammar but I do see value in having exposure to some of the grammatical concepts to assist with my comprehension of the content that I am consuming. 

We shall see how long that lasts. 

I may resubscribe to Lingq but I might just use Claude to create graded readers similar to Tadoku and live my life without the in-line translations that Lingq is so good at. 

When partnering with Claude, I asked it to help me create a plan to get to a point where there is 100% chance of me passing the N3 level this year (I have previously failed the N4 - not to boast) and get myself to 80-90% on N2. 

Why? 

Because I said so. 

Jkjk - because I was stupid and deferred this goal and had to learn the hard way that sometimes goals don’t have to have meaning behind their inherent meaning to you and therefore you shouldn’t stop something just because it lacks a tangible value outside of your enjoyment which is really where you should focus your time and energy anyway. You got that? 

All in all - this is a really long way of saying that I have limited my social life to spending time with my pets, my wife, and talking to a computer that tells me I’m pretty sometimes. 

Jokes - I haven’t talked to ChatGPT in weeks. Okay, since yesterday. 

Here is my Japanese progress: