Great resource, thanks for sharing.

I thought the written text was very high quality and didn't show many of the usual tells of a non-native writer. Could you share some details of how you used AI tools to help write it?

Copy-and-pasting to ChatGPT. Machine translation (JP to EN) before this LLM era was already high quality, but LLM does a really great job. It does not translate as is, but understands the context, drops unnecessary expressions (important!), and outputs a more natural translation.

That said, LLM is ofc not perfect, especially when the original text (or Japanese itself) is ambiguous. So I've heavily modified the text too. That's why there are some typos :cry:

I remember being given a large K'nex construction set as a toy at Christmas. I can still feel the visceral excitement of opening it up and looking at all the pieces, imagine what kind of things I'd build. I think the ferris wheel was my favorite.

A few years ago I was a bit down abd feeling like I'd never experience that kind of excitement and joy again. I've come to realize that now I'm older it's my job to create that same joy in others.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful day and can find a way to create just a little moment of joy for someone else. Merry Christmas!

K'nex! They exist! I had forgotten all about them. I also (now) fondly remember the K'nex Christmas.

I still remember phone numbers from radio ads I heard as a kid. I don't have any phone number memorized apart from my own

The framing of something can totally affect how you feel about it.

If I set a goal to run 5km everyday and one day I run 4km I feel like I've failed. Somehow not meeting the goal invalidates any positive feelings of running the 4km.

I think a lot of side projects have an implicit, unstated goal of "finishing" or "releasing". This is setting yourself up for the same trap as the runner.

For me it helps if the goal is simply to "run". Without setting any end-goal. Just to start on it, and only do it ad long as I like doing it.

It also helps if instead of "run for 5km" I think of the destination "run to the supermarket, to get some cake".

With side-projects is not "add 3 features". It's "add feature A, which then enables B, C, D functionalities".

Also, the more you work on something, the more questions you answer and even more new questions show up. By doing something on your project, you make progress, you unveil the previously unkown. I like thinking of implementing something not as getting closer to the finish line, but as expanding the horizon and seeing more into the distance, instead or looking at a close, dense fog wall of "what could have been".

My favourite board game rulebook is Pictomania. It starts by giving a very high level view of what the whole game looks like. It's a single page in the rulebook and doesn't get bogged down in details.

Then, it explains the small details of the scoring system. Since you know how the whole game basically works you can mentally hang the smaller rules onto the overall game system.

It reminds me of Jeremy Howards Fast AI course. He teaches "the whole game" with some of the details skipped. Then, he adds details one by one so you never get lost. The analogy often used is teaching sports to children. You start with a simplified version of the sport (For soccer: kick the ball into the other goal) and then you add extra rules (out of bounds, off-side, penalties etc) when they come up.

Not quite music, but I had quite the adventure learning pitch perception as it applies to languages.

As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both "hashi" but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't bother me too much.

One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before.

Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.

I think you could definitely do the same thing to learn relative pitch. In western music theory there's generally only 12 notes. And #1 and #12 are the same, an octave, which many people can recognize implicitly

Furthermore, while a piano might have 88 keys (still doable with practice) most actual music rarely jumps more than an octave or two.

Generally, music is also further restricted to a key/mode of 8 notes, again with 1 and 8 being the octave, which you probably already know

If I were to teach myself again, I would first find a reference for the intervals 1-8 in a major key and in a minor key. Or learn the full 12 at once if that's more sensible to you. For example the main theme from "Jaws" is a minor 2nd (2/12. Or the song for Happy Birthday (in the USA) starts with a major 2nd (3/12). I had a few more examples, but this Wikipedia article seems to have far better information than I could give you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition

You could also just try to listen to music, possibly at half or quarter speed (easy to do on YouTube), and try to write down the notes, and checking your answers, I'm sure that could work.

Best of luck!!

You have a fencepost error; the notes in Western music in equal temperament are C, C♯/D♭, D, D♯/E♭, E, F, F♯/G♭, G, G♯/A♭, A, A♯/B♭, B, then c an octave higher is the thirteenth.

Ah thank you for the correction, I'm just a hobbyist and have not practiced in a few years

It’s accurate to say that there are twelve intervals, anyway, which is the point you were making.

In my experience the Japanese don’t refer to this as a change in pitch, but as you say, they consider it an emphasis.

The Japanese Wikipedia page for pitch accents simply call it “Accent for Japanese dialects“.

That is to say, I don’t think this is pitch as in musical pitch perfect.

It is not referred to as a change in pitch, usually people call it intonation or accent, but the actual change in sounds is a change in pitch.

The closest thing in English is "uh-oh" (said when you make a mistake). It goes high-low. If you reverse the pitches it sounds completely wrong.

The pitch change in Japanese words is smaller than "uh-oh" but it's the same basic idea.

yeah I was wondering the same thing. I'm only marginally familiar with Japanese, but studied mandarin in Taiwan for years and Chinese is considered a significantly more "tonal" language in terms of pitching up, pitching down, etc.

I'd be interested to see if there are any studies around any correlation between absolute pitch and a tonal native language though.

I would temper your expectations. Singing lessons will improve your singing faster than practicing alone but it still may take years and years to develop.

I had always enjoyed singing and I started singing and piano lessons at the same time. With consistent practice you can improve at the piano, learn more complex pieces and see your progress. With singing the process is a lot more mysterious. You probably don't understand the things that are going on inside your body very well and the teacher can't just say "Try putting your first finger on this key and your middle finger on this key".

After three years I could play reasonably complicated pop songs on the piano and read chords. I'm still a few steps the average "someone who likes to sing level".

I've lived in Japan for over a decade and I think this article summarizes some aspects of English education well. I'd like to share a few of my thoughts and experiences too.

English is often put on a very high pedestal. Speaking fluent English is associated with being "elite". A tech company in my city is slowly moving to doing all development work in English. I went to a casual tech talk event they held. Every talk was given in Japanese and most of them started with a joke along the lines of "[In English] Hello everyone, good evening! [In Japanese] Hahah, of course I'm not going to give the whole talk in English" It makes sense to give all the talks in Japanese to a Japanese speaking audience, but the whole vibe was that English was so impossible that the idea of giving a talk in English was absurd.

Some of my friends have kids with mixed-roots. They have grown up speaking English and Japanese. They sometimes modify their English pronunciation to sound "more Japanese" when they start English classes in school. They don't want to stand out amongst their peers.

I remember one kid, who was tri-lingual. He told a story about being called upon in English class to translate the Japanese word for "great-grandfather". He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather". They teacher and the class laughed at him. Of course, there are bad teachers everywhere but one wonders if the teacher would have tried to take him down a peg so much if he fit in a bit better. He ended up moving to Germany with his family. It makes me feel quite sad that a kid born and raised here can end up feeling more at home in a place he has no connection to.

That sounds like a universal experience to be honest; a lot of English teachers (that aren't native English themselves) often over-estimate their own abilities.

And not just restricted to English; it's a very common experience in the U.S. for native speakers of, e.g. Spanish, to end up in Spanish-language courses with non-native Spanish teachers, with modest Spanish skills. I assume it's the case with all language teachers especially at a non-advanced level.

At least having English as an elite-signalling language is still quasi useful. Over here kids slave over ancient Latin or Greek to prove that their parents are elite.

As someone who enjoys languages, I observe with irony that in terms of proficiency per unit of effort spent, at least formal ancient language education isn't a such a waste of effort that formal language education is, in the sense that immersion will teach you language more painlessly, and with more velocity and distance than formal modern language education will; but immersion is quite inaccessible for ancient languages.

Disclaimer: I am European AND Old, so I studied Latin for 8 years (Middle School + High School).

I am not sure I really understand your comment here. If you are studying an ancient language you acquire zero fluency in it. At best you can read it, unless you were lucky enough to meet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Foster_(Latinist) (and this would apply to Latin exclusively).

So it is a bit like saying, I dunno, "in terms of proficiency per unit of effort spent" playing Street Fighter is more "efficient" than practicing a martial art in an actual gym/dojo.

Indeed, I agree that you acquire hardly any fluency in classical languages with formal education. I suppose that I don't express this well, but I was trying to say that a natural language formally taught does not readily give you much fluency in it either, whereas immersion would give you fluency more readily and pleasurably.

My analogy would be more like this: learning dead languages in the classroom is to playing arcade flying games like how learning modern language in the sterile classroom is to a flight simulator, and immersion is pilot hours spent.

That is, with respect to acquiring skill in flying, time spent in a simulator is inferior to immersion-dominant learning, even with respect to acquiring skill for the simulator. It is in respect to the accessibility of immersion that I say that there is waste in classroom-dominant modern language learning. With arcade flying there is no such thing as arcade physics in the world, so with respect to acquiring what little skill is realistic, there is no better realistically accessible way.

I'm also old enough to have been forced to study Latin for years at school, on equal par with Spanish and French. I'm sorry I didn't take it seriously. Latin underpins so many languages, and a basis in Latin can help enormously figuring out strange words.

In my home country (Italy) the "usefulness" of teaching Latin in non-technical schools (i.e. High School, basically) has been debated for at least one century now.

I do not regret having studied it, especially because I had good grades with little effort, but I came to the conclusion that yeah, maybe it would be better to devote more hours to general purpose stuff (think logic, statistics, basic accountancy and and stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow) which would probably be more useful for people who need to operate in modern society.

If you really want to study Latin or Greek (or anything like that) you can do it as a hobby, or choose a University track that includes those. But as an average citizen I think that an understanding of the numbers published by media, or the ability to manage your own budget with a spreadsheet would be definitely a better investment in terms of time.

EDIT: forgot to add that I am talking specifically of high school in Italy, I do not know if other countries already provide more "practical" forms of education to their general population.

> He told a story about being called upon in English class to translate the Japanese word for "great-grandfather"

Very similar/relevant shimura ken skit. https://youtu.be/67KlmXYDom4

> They sometimes modify their English pronunciation to sound "more Japanese" when they start English classes in school

I saw a video where an American was trying to order a McFlurry at McDonalds in Japan and the worker couldn't understand "McFlurry" pronounced in English so they had to pronounce it in what (without context) would sound quite racist.

For the curious, it would be something like "makku-fu-ruri"

This was my experience in Japan as well. So many words we're used to saying in English use mouth shapes that the Japanese language does not, so you really have to tweak how you say things to align with what's available.

"Coffee" is a fun one for the tired westerner

I've also had this happen in France and German-Swiss, so I don't think this is unique to Japan! :)

How is this any different from going into a Panda Express and trying to order in Mandarin?

Because it's called a McFlurry on the menu. Japan is very fond of taking loanwords from English but changing the pronunciation and meaning, which can be one of the hardest parts of any language.

> those who do, simply use local words to express their American thoughts.

I feel like there's almost the reverse stereotype of this for Americans living in Japan. Like, that they're weirdly obsessed with Japanese culture and try too hard to become more Japanese.

> Having someone speak your native language makes things infinitely easier to understand and more engaging.

I don't really disagree with this. However, it's only axiomatically true if you hold teaching skill constant. I once learned far more on Tuesdays and Thursdays from a brilliant teacher who spoke no English than I did on Mondays and Wednesdays from a perfectly bi-lingual instructor who was only meh.

When I taught ESL I held onto English-only except in extremis. Knowing (though only a bit of, in my case) the other language, could otherwise become unproductive. As the teacher, it was on me to find the four or five (or however many were necessary!) ways to get to the concept in English. Hearing all of them may have only been necessary for a few of the students, but hearing them was re-inforcing for the students who had 'got it' first time.

> I feel like most Americans are completely oblivious to the idea that other cultures might exist. I work for an American company in Europe, and most of Americans don't do any effort to learn the local language, and those who do, simply use local words to express their American thoughts.

Yeah. As a Brit living in Japan, the Americans are often a more foreign culture than the Japanese, and far less willing to work to bridge the distance and avoid misunderstandings.

> doing all development work in English.

You need to do some development work in English. Programing language keywords are all English?

Like there isn't really a python in Japanese?

Ironically, Ruby is a Japanese created language, and is outside of cobol the most English word heavy languages I've used.

15 years ago I was a student in Japan and worked a part-time job at one of these conversation places. One of the successful teachers put it best: "You're not a teacher, you're a chat show host".

You're doing entertainment first. A game here, a crazy story there. Nothing to challenging, people want to have a polite, entertaining experience. If they learn something along the way that's fine but they won't really care if they don't.

There was a wide range of students. Some serious, usually planning to study overseas in the future. Some people just there for a hobby or an outlet. There were a few people who came to offload their problems to someone who they felt was outside the normal social structure (and therefore not going to judge them). I think people in general felt they were much freer to speak using English rather than Japanese.

I likened it (and my later work a the token gaijin in a large company), as being a pet, or a zoo animal. Treated well, but never integrated. I was told that I could never be a manager in my company, because it would make Japanese people anxious to have a foreign boss.

> I think people in general felt they were much freer to speak using English rather than Japanese.

That's true to my experience with Japanese ESL students (not in Japan). Some explicitly told me that themselves; many others had that vibe.

It's worth giving Aisle a try. It's from Sam Barlow (creator of Her Story).

You only have one command, and then the story "ends". It's an interesting way to tell a narrative. You can feel the DNA of Her Story in there.