@sun @mitchconner it's definitely slow, I'm only just now learning all of the hiragana and the katakana I still suck ass at. But it's still fun.

@sun @mitchconner @beardalaxy
most important skill is hearing, if the usual "memorise words as logic puzzle" approach isn't working (that yields lesser fluency anyhow

watch things with subs, but stop to really hear and reproduce exactly what they say, like drawing exercise

@ageha @mitchconner @beardalaxy I have actually started trying to do that recently, it works a lot better when you stop and force yourself to identify the words yeah. some people are insanely quiet and mumbly talkers here

@sun @mitchconner @beardalaxy
"man" speak and old people are toughest, mmm (both at once is xx

@sun @mitchconner @beardalaxy i am not trying to gloat and ots probably not very wild but I've been watching a german show, subtitled to spanish with a local llm, and I've kinda slowly (very) started to understand a little bit of german. It reminds me of the way I learned english (playing gta sa/nfsc/n64 games on my first ever laptop when I was 6 onwards). Some games had spanish text + english voices (gta sa) and somehow that made it "click"

@mischievoustomato @mitchconner @beardalaxy people are offended by LLMs for a number of valid and invalid reasons but one of the invalid ones is they are offended by the "impurity" of something that gets right answers the wrong way, or that someone might find it useful even if it's wrong a lot but still also right a lot and still ends up saving them a ton of work.

@mischievoustomato @beardalaxy @mitchconner learning a language boils down to "whatever works for you" and there definitely is not an objectively correct way to do it

@sun @mitchconner @beardalaxy yeah it's a wildly subjective thing. I don't know if I'll get serious with learning german, but if it becomes a nice byproduct of entertainment, that's good

@sun @beardalaxy @mischievoustomato @mitchconner
>whatever works for you
It's dependent on how you, your brain, interprets the world/surroundings.
I've been pondering on that for many years and there are definitively groups of people who share similarities.

@sun @mitchconner @beardalaxy pretty much. it's not flawless at translation and doesnt really get context since my tomatobook isnt fast enough for beeg contexts (and ollama/llama vulkan support with intel seems kinda weird...) but it's good enough to understand episodes. Me and mom enjoy it a lot. There's no argument an anti-ai person could bring up to make me think this is "wrong" or "bad".

@mischievoustomato @sun @mitchconner I'm still hoping that my idea of eventually being able to play animal crossing in Japanese works for me. Idk about the later games, but the original has a hiragana-only mode since that's what little kids know instead of all this kanji. I didn't learn English from animal crossing per se, but I learned so much about grammar and sentence structure as well as a lot of vocabulary from it. Video games in general, back before there was voice acting and you had to read everything, really forced me to learn how to read better hahaha.

I'm getting pretty close to knowing all the hiragana characters, and I know a good bit of vocab too, so I reckon that in a few months I'll be ready to try it out.

@mischievoustomato @mitchconner @beardalaxy @sun I sometimes listen to my wife's karaoke streams at night and I feel that it has helped me a lot with understanding spoken Japanese. (I actually started doing this mostly to have a /comfy/er sleep. )I don't have a translation to check my understanding or whatever but I had already studied before so I can manage it. I sometimes rewind on certain parts until I can understand what my wife is saying (she speaks fast sometimes) but if she uses vocabulary that I don't know I can only hope that I will understand it the next time I put it on.

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@mitchconner I still feel like I'm 21 lol, it'll probably all hit me at once if I ever get married