This past week, I picked up a random short manga, started reading it, and…kept going to the end. I’ve never done that before, always ended up stopping. And I understood almost every last bit of it! Huge dopamine hit. I can already tell I’m going to be brimming with confidence by the time I finish my textbook in the Spring.

I also heard some wild stories about the JLPT through the grapevine. People getting disqualified because of their phones because of new rules and such. It’s freaking me out a bit, hah.

I am learning several languages with the owl, but two of those I can and do poorly speak already. I need to be more rigorous, as I’m not really advancing. I learn new words or rule exceptions but forget them through lack of use.

I played around with a local LLM to practice my written French. It worked pretty well although I had to play with some settings so it would stop writing essays in response to my comments.

I’ve begun speaking more with people in my goal language. It’s scary, but when it works, very rewarding.

We were on the road this weekend, so I had to navigate some hotel staff interactions. I was able to understand much of the language, but my ability to speak is quite limited still.

My reading is soaring forward. I finished my A2 learning book (pass #1, I’ll read it again soon) and am working through some other children’s books for basics practice.

Going for JLPT today ! I’ll give my best, feeling pretty ready.

Starting the A1 track for French on the app I use. I think I’m starting to get the gist of basic sentence construction in French now…

Still have close to zero ability to communicate in French though, I can really only handle buying stuff at the supermarket in French

Downloaded some podcasts but they’re a bit above my level. I’ll gradually work towards those

On unrelated terms, started learning Dutch pronunciation yesterday and I’m… positively impressed at how “English” the language sounds