Yman

  It's been almost a year since I started my daily study of Japanese, and about 10 months since my previous post about it. So how's it going? Apps I ended up dropping almost all the apps due to them either being too restricted in the free tier, not fun enough, or not effective enough, or not having enough time and energy to do them in addition to the ones I felt to be part of my core routine. I'll focus here on the few that I do feel are part of the core routine, and the few extras that I feel are almost but not quite there. DuoLingo The main strong point with this app is how it gets me to consistently maintain my streak, which means maintaining a daily study habit. The way that it's gamified and the fact that it's very forgiving help me avoid falling off completely. It's also okay in terms of drills and introducing new vocabulary, but it feels very slow and based on doing repetitive exercises rather than giving instructions or moving forward with new material. ...

In K-Pop Demon Hunters (KPDH), patterns are a mark of demons, but what they mark is the shame that the demon feels. Rumi, as the child of a demon, also has marks. Throughout her life, these marks keep growing. When she was a small child, these marks were tiny: As she grew older, the marks kept growing: As she got closer and closer to the moment she was going to seal the Golden Honmun and supposedly get rid of her demon marks, the marks kept spreading, until they reached her throat, and she lost her voice: It was only when she was with Jinu, when she started to feel more at ease about having demon patterns, that her voice returned. But why were the marks growing in the first place? Rumi had nothing to be ashamed of. She never did anything wrong. She dedicated her life to protecting the world from the demons. It was Celine. Celine believed that having a demon for a father, that having demon patterns, was something to be ashamed of. Rumi originally didn't feel this way and wanted to s...