Tech Over Tea - #51 Hobby Language Learning - feat Livakivi

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

On this episode of Tech Over Tea, our guest is Livakivi who runs a language learning channel and the level of effort he puts into his content puts me to shame, it makes me want to work harder on what I do. Today we chat about, Japanese learning, the problems we've encountered and even get into a bit of Runescape. ==========Guest Links========== YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Livakivi Twitter: https://twitter.com/Livakivi Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/Livakivi Discord: https://discord.com/invite/TQnWvqD ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Welcome back to Tech of a T. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson, and today it is episode 51. And today's guest has, he's made a video that, it's one of those videos where, like five years from now, it'll pop up in the YouTube recommendations and suddenly get like 10 million views. But, as of right now, no one's seen it it it's called i what was the exact titles i watched jojo 50 times to learn japanese is that exactly what it was or am i slightly off there oh yeah it was it was a i watched a i watched an episode of jojo 50 times to learn japanese basically i have no idea how only 2 000 people have seen that it does not make any sense to me i'm actually pretty glad that even 2 000 people have seen it because uh so far most other videos have done way worse than

that one so yeah that's fair uh let's see what what have your other videos done so oh your best performing one was your your best performing one was your first video okay that's a it's a weird way to go but that i'm all right with that because that was like that video took me like over 100 hours to make probably it was like 30 minutes long oh geez okay yeah i've noticed that uh you put a lot of production value in your videos. Yeah, it's like when I make like this isn't actually my first YouTube channel. I've been making videos since 2009 and I've always liked making videos which have nice editing and like nice pacing and stuff like that. which have nice editing and nice pacing and stuff like that. Because I basically got into making videos through video editing.

I just like video editing. And that's why whenever I have made YouTube videos, I also want them to be nicely edited, almost for the sake of just editing. Even if it doesn't really provide any substance to the the video it's just a bit more enjoyable to watch so i enjoy it myself so that's why i make them more that's why i put more focus on like editing and synergy with audio and things like that well before we get too far into stuff like that give people a quick rundown of what you're doing now i'll show your channel on the screen there we go all right so basically i just finished making a video which is my experience with duolingo essentially i caught that one a bit earlier today that was

a pretty good video oh nice well basically i'm learning japanese now i used to learn russian a bit but i started learning japanese and i actually got pretty interested in like um just language learning in general so i had i started formulating a lot of thoughts about it and i decided that i could make um like even for myself like the first video I made was a video for myself to some extent like just to keep a diary of my Japanese learning experience but at the same time I thought like I have a lot of other thoughts too which I could share with people so I decided that that for now I I'm going to just make videos about some random thoughts I want to share.

And so far, they have all been about language learning. But in the future, I will probably make some other videos as well. But basically, you could call my channel right now a language learning channel, mostly focusing on Japanese. But it's not limited to that in the future for sure yeah I think while you still have a fairly small channel it's it's a good time to start experimenting with other sort of content because once you have an established audience that's when it becomes kind of difficult to actually I guess try new things out without without the video basically completely

bombing at the size you're at now if a video does well that's actually surprising but once there's an audience there it's it's a bit harder to break out of a niche yeah sure it's like um a lot of people get upset if you like break free from a established video format that you've built an audience on. Like especially like gaming channels, which like play only one game. And then when they change the game, a lot of people get really upset about it. Yeah, there's a lot of streamers who've definitely had that problem. Like when I know of a couple of GTA streamers streamers who decided i'm i've played gta 5 for 4 000 hours i'm kind of bored of it now and then they try something else and nobody watches it

yeah it's uh it's kind of like the sad side of streaming i suppose that when you get burnt out from a game and you want to try something else, it will most likely at first, at least underperform in terms of views and your audience will probably not like it as much. And I suppose it's definitely, it's especially for some specific games, like when you have a fan base, which does not like a specific game game such as um i know a lot of streamers who like to stream league of legends sometimes and every time they do so like a lot of people get really upset about it because like they hate the game that's not a game i've ever felt any desire to play i i don't know why you'd want to play

something like league everything i hear about it like anyone who's super into it doesn't make the game sound fun it just makes it sound like suffering basically yeah it's basically i've actually played it quite a lot i I like it because it's like stimulating. It's just like... It's a fun competitive game. It's fun to... It's satisfying to some extent to play it when you improve and get better and so on

and outplay your enemies and so on. But at the same time, I'm kind of avoiding playing it as well right now because it's just um it's like when you play a game of ranked it has the potential to completely ruin your day basically and i kind of don't want to like spend time on that and end up losing something like having my mood ruined by a ranked game or whatever because even if like even if you have a good mentality and all that it's still if if like something really bad happens in the game like some teammate going afk or feeding it's like it still kind of sucks you know yeah i'm i I guess I used to play a lot of multiplayer games,

but as I got older, I realized that when I play games, I sort of just don't want anyone to be around me. I'd much rather just do something by myself. Even though a lot of JRPGs take God knows how long to finish, that's sort of where I've spent a lot of my recent years. But I guess when I was growing up, I was playing like a lot of Call of Duty, a lot of Battlefield.

And yeah, there's just, there's something about competitive games like that, which I just, I can't get myself to go back into. And I think it's that same reason that you were saying about League. Obviously a game of Call of Duty, it doesn't take as long, but it does have, like if you have a really bad game it's gonna basically ruin the rest of the session

yeah yeah that's interesting like for myself i've always like not always but usually the my most played games all all are all multiplayer games like League, Counter-Strike, RuneScape, I suppose. But I do understand the... I really like competitive games. But at the same time, I kind of feel like the time I spend or have spent on a game such as League is at the same time kind of like a missed opportunity to do something else, like to play, let's say, campaign games which have a story in them. Like when I spend 100 hours on League,

it doesn't really change anything. But when I spend 100 hours on another game, it might have a story or some elements or something which contributes way more to my life than just another 100 hours of League. Upon the thousands which I've already spent on it. Well, you know what we can talk about? We can talk about RuneScape because I have plenty of experience in that game as well. I spent, oh oh god how many years from the update the Grand Exchange came out so what 2007 or so? Yeah it was like

after me 2007 I suppose. So I played from then until about I think it was when the RS3 beta started. So like 2013, 2014, whenever that was. Yeah, like after EOC. But yeah, I remember when the RS3 beta came out, like had the fancy UI and render distance and stuff like that. I remember how much people at the time hated it and just didn't want that to happen. Yeah. EOC was like Evolution of Combat.

Basically, for those who don't know, like RuneScape has a really unique combat system. It's really simple, but at the same time, it's like kind of unique and allows for very interesting mechanics in the game. But they basically changed that to be something more like, some people will be annoyed, but like a World of Warcraft style system where you have abilities

and overkill damage and things like that. But a lot of people were really upset at that because it completely changed the game and it was pretty broken at the beginning. So basically over half the player base ended up quitting over that update, which is why basically the old school version of the game has been released. Because a lot of people were complaining to Jagex, which is the owner of the game, to basically bring back the old version of the game. And they finally did. And now it's way more popular than the actual modern one.

I didn't realize it was more popular. I knew the player base of RS3 was dwindling, but it's been dwindling for a while. I remember the first time it started to come down was after one of the first big bot started to come down was after like the first one of the first big bot nukes that happened um that was years ago

and I didn't realize how many bot accounts there were until that happened and then like half the logged in users just disappeared um but it was nice I went to um it's been so long since i played the game what was

the village that had drain or village the one with all the willow trees i went there after the bot nuke happened and there was like two people there it was lovely because every time you went there before that there was always like 20 or 30 players just cutting the trees they weren't talking and they were obviously all bots yeah it's like i remember like in 2011 and 20 tell which was really bad like everything was just infested with bots because check x hasn't hadn't really like made a proper anti-bot system back then uh they had some waves of bands like let's say they picked a specific area and banned all the players there sometimes. But yeah, the new modern version, RS3, has a really good anti-bot system, basically. It's actually pretty impressive because RuneScape is one of those games which is probably the

most-botted game of all time, and really advanced bots as well. Because the system is already so advanced that the bots have to get advanced as well. Basically, Jagex hired one of the biggest bot creators to work on an anti-bot system as well. And from what I remember they had they said that the systems that they have are so advanced that basically uh they are able to distinguish between every single player uh like non-bot players as well like if i were to play in my account and suddenly log into like i don't know account, then they will be able to detect that, that it's me that logged into your account because it's basically, it learns from

your behavior that it's you, like your mouse clicks, your movement speed, everything like that. And so basically in old school, they could activate all those systems as well to get rid of all the bots but i guess the risk is that if you have like false positives like innocent players being tagged as bots and getting banned that's like really bad when you think about it yeah that's kind of dangerous that's definitely true because if the system's not working perfectly then yeah that's gonna be a problem because runescape as much as i enjoyed the game a lot of it a lot of it was really boring if you're trying to grind out a 99 it's just you put a movie on in the background like you have your hand just automatically doing stuff you're not even paying any attention um i i think i got i got 99 fletching

before you could just say fletch everything in your inventory so you had to click one by one each thing you wanted to fletch oh that was hell um yeah people now have it so easy with getting 99 you can just say oh cook all up burn all It's so easy. But it's just me complaining about our... Speaking of hundreds of hours wasted, there's hundreds of hours wasted. Yeah, RuneSkip is like an advanced cookie clicker, basically. But it's... Sorry.

Nothing. It's like just a really weird game. Very often, you don't really play the game you just have it in the background but what i was going to say was that uh we had very different experiences with the game i saw the video you did on uh how runescape made us fluent that was actually a really interesting video oh thank you so for the for people who haven't seen it just give them a quick rundown on what actually uh what you're talking about in that video because it actually was okay fairly good

points you were making there well basically the game is like the way the game is built is um you can pretty much every item or object or even like some like um how do you say it like environment objects like rocks and stones and you can basically click on them and it says like it tells you what it's called like i can click on a door and it says that it's a door and so on and basically the game is um when you get in like when i started playing runescape i i was still not fluent in english at all like i had just started english lessons in school so all i knew like my entire english was based on stuff that I had picked up from movies and games before that, but it was still not enough to even get past like the tutorial and stuff because I didn't really understand English. But over time, the way the game works is that it's so easy

to get started in, like if you just explore, that you don't even need to know english however when you played a lot uh when you you start understanding uh you start like remembering the words which are in the game such as like how an axe is something that you cut trees with and a tree is a tree and what a cow is called what chickens are called and so on and so it also has like this chat box which like logs every action you do in the game and um they are pretty much when you play the game for hundreds or thousands of hours you you keep seeing the same messages over and over again and they are all in pretty correct British English. So basically, you memorize some of the lines in the game.

And by doing so, you basically start seeing the logic behind them. What I'm basically trying to say is that it's a game which is really good at comprehensive input and comprehensive input is basically understanding some input like a sentence without even needing to without even having needing to look up the words or something which are in there like when i point at an apple and say that is an apple then even if you don't understand understand english you probably know that what an apple is just from that sentence so runescape is pretty much really good at that and it was probably a large contributor to my own english at the time well it definitely gave you a lot of a lot more opportunities to actually read english because it's one thing to be assigned readings in class

but if you're like just if you just want to play this game then you have to even if you have no idea what's really going on you can you sort of have to force yourself to try and work it out and it does help that you have like because it you're you're like clicking on different objects in the game and you have a like a visual representation of it if you don't know like specifically how to actually uh what that actually means you can sort of work it out from the context of what you're seeing yeah exactly i think that's actually that's actually really cool and i saw someone in the comments say uh it would be really cool for something uh something like this to exist for japanese and i also can't think of anything else

that uh would would fit that that because sadly runescape doesn't have a a japanese version that would be that would be amazing yeah yeah it's like i really want that as well because uh actually it'd be horrible because i'd start playing the game again and waste all of my life but apart from that it would help with japanese learning yeah for sure because like um even though I actually know about 5,000 words in Japanese already, there are still a lot of words which I don't know, which are in RuneScape, such as types of trees, types of fish, like willow, yew, oak trees, and so on. I don't really know those.

And it has this really specific vocabulary it has like thousands of words which um you probably don't encounter in everyday life well you could encounter in everyday life but you don't learn them from textbooks and so on like i learned russian in school for six years but never did anyone like the textbook have a word for willow like the willow tree and stuff like that the same way how like games such as Minecraft I remember there was like I think someone was at the barber that I know. And the barber was talking to another barber. And they were basically talking about how their child already knows some words in English. Like, how did my child know what cobblestone is called?

In Estonian, like, they were speaking in Estonian, of course. So they were, like, surprised that their child know knew what cobblestone is in English and it's really obvious where that came from it's obviously from Minecraft basically and it's like things like that are pretty useful actually because right now I am I'm much earlier in the Japanese language learning process. I've been doing it for like two months or so now. Oh, nice. So, yeah, something like that.

Right now, I'm working through WaniKani mainly for vocabulary. And I recently started going through TakeM for grammar stuff. Yeah. Actually, that's one thing I don't want to talk about um i feel like start like i don't have that many words to work with right now but i do know a lot of words from like that i've just heard over time over and over again from watching anime like there's some things you will pick up even they won't pick up most of it. Like, I didn't know the, like... Say, for example, the... How you would write out ice in kanji. But I already knew that was a kodi.

Yeah. It's just something I'd heard that, like, over and over again. Where was I going with this? Right, that's where I was going with this. The point that made me realise how much i already happen to know was once i started working uh through take him stuff and realizing how you can actually piece together sentences and not just taking the sentences that were already there sort of trying to fit other words that i'd heard over time into the sentence to see if it makes sense oh yeah for sure that's like

kind of similar to the runescape thing so like i in the video i brought an example of like how there was this feature called quick chat which was basically you could send like messages like pre-composed messages basically and uh for example you could say what your skill is in a certain skill i suppose like my strength level is that so you could basically say you could translate the same thing with a different word as well for example my english is not good or whatever like uh those kinds of like when you have some level like at one point sentences start like clicking like the grammar and stuff like starts clicking with you when you see when you're exposed to it enough

yeah that definitely makes sense and the good thing about that quick chat is because it's constructing the sentences for you it forces a i guess a structure that would actually make sense in english oh yeah absolutely it's like um when i had to use it basically all the sentences i sent and saw were correct English like grammatically correct because it they were pre-composed and I remember that when I was in another account or in like other games usually when people talked they weren't always from like they weren't always native in English. They were often talking in really broken grammar, really broken English.

So I'm not surprised at all that a lot of people who I know had way more broken grammar than I did at the time. Even though they maybe wrote more in English than I did at the time even though like they maybe wrote more in English than I did but it's just like they they talked to people who also had broken grammar so they like picked up their patterns and uh didn't improve on those yeah that's one thing I always notice in uh oh sorry no go ahead okay one thing i always notice yeah one thing i always notice in english is like uh uh well a classic example is how people mess up you like your and your like like uh you are and yours yeah yeah basically but uh what annoys me more is like how people mess up lose and lose like that's like everywhere i don't know how like even i know even video games which have like typos in that like rampage knights is one and um i guess it's it's almost like such a common mistake that

some people don't even know which is the correct version yeah that's how i feel about um to and to i i've been speaking english my entire life i can't remember which is which most of the time oh i'm two and two yeah i assume yeah yeah yeah i should know but i i don't know everyone already like the thing when you speak to people who are native in a language is they're not going to correct you all the time when you make a mistake especially when you're both fluent in a language like you you can sort of understand the context of what someone's saying if you are fluent in a language even if what they're saying isn't 100 correct yeah it's like and also native people in their native language also like often they don't know how to correct you like they just know if something is wrong but they don't know why it's wrong or how to like explain it for example like uh same way in estonian where when somebody

like messes up messes up a conjugation i don't know from the top of my head what it's called like past perfect something but like i don't i don't really know how to explain that it's wrong it's just i know what the correct version is and that the version you said is wrong. Yeah. And I feel like it's especially common with Japanese. Like one thing is that when a Japanese native tries to correct you, one issue is the English language barrier. Like they might not be completely fluent in English either. And the other thing is just that

japanese is just such a mysterious language like for example the particles the gob article the one which everyone has always trouble with it's just there is no like there is no proper there is no rule to it it's just something that you have to learn like to use through intuition and naturally yeah that's like the same thing oh okay just go ahead i was gonna say the problem with being uh something being your first language if you haven't actually studied the grammar is you sort of have a intuitive knowledge of the grammar but yeah if you you can't even if you learned it in school most of what you learned you've sort of already internalized before that point and a lot of it is stuff you're not gonna really bother remembering because you already sort of knew it anyway if that makes sense yeah yeah

it's uh, it's basically, you basically have just like, you just have learned the language, basically. You just know what's correct or wrong intuitively, what sounds natural and what doesn't, but you don't know the mathematics behind it. Yeah. I guess in Estonian, there is like, in Estonian, you have Estonian grammar lessons for up until the 12th grade. And I think in college as well. Because speaking-wise, it's not really that complicated of a language.

But writing is pretty complicated in the sense that you have a lot of rules, which English doesn't, for example. Where to put a comma? Well, of course, English has that as well. But the comma rules, where to put a comma, is really strict in Estonian and has specific rules. And the other thing is, when should you write a word separately? Often in Estonian, you have two words combined into one so let's say something like a railway crossing in English you just say railway crossing like separate words

but in Estonian there is some rule that when you have two words of a specific type, you have to write them together. So it basically becomes railway crossing as one word instead of two. And basically those things are which even like people, like adults, often like ask over even their children, like, am I supposed to write this word as one or two because they are the ones who are studying it in school and as an adult you kind of forget the rules sometimes but like now I remember

I used to have much more trouble with that as a child in school but now I just have like an intuitive understanding of it but even though I don't know the rules at all anymore because I forgot the logic like I forgot the specific rules yep another big problem you have with uh speaking with native speakers is you end up uh coming across especially when you're it's a language that's used across many different countries like english's you have different i guess colloquialisms

based on the country oh yeah so if you try to speak to someone who main like who speaks a lot of australian colloquialisms it's gonna be hard to understand them even as a someone who knows english in australia because even between like different areas of the country some of that is just not used but you can still roughly get a gist of it i guess from i don't know i guess it's from partially the tone and the the situation you're in but it's hard if it's not your native language that's for sure i'm sure that's true for estonian as well there's going to be some shorthand ways of saying things that don't exactly line up with what you'd say in a textbook yeah it's um in estonia i guess the good thing with estonian is that it doesn't exist outside of estonia so it doesn't have a lot of variations. And Estonia itself is so tiny that there is barely any dialects.

Some dialects exist, but they're so tiny that you don't really encounter them every day, if ever. And yeah, there is some difference between written and spoken Estonian, but I don't think it's as prominent as it is, for example, in Japanese, where you have apparently also differences between spoken and written Japanese. When you look up a word in the dictionary, it sometimes just says it's it sometimes just says it's uh clearly like strictly spoken language like a spoken word like japanese is a pretty scary language in that sense it has a lot of like weird edge cases and stuff one of the things i do like about japanese though is that you have a much more constrained i guess what's the word um much more constrained uh sound set i guess would be that's probably that's not the correct term at all but the the sounds in the language is far more restrict than say english for example yeah i get what you mean. It's like when you write a word, it's more like, you know how to read it most of the time.

Like the syllables are the same sound pretty much every time. Obviously, there are the exceptions like how Wa is the Ha character. But apart from that, there's not that many weird exceptions. Yeah, that's definitely a good part, like a nice feature of Japanese. It's actually really similar to Estonian. Estonian is extreme on that. Everything you write, you read the exact same way.

Every letter is always pronounced pretty much the same way. Maybe there are a a few very very very like small edge cases there but uh yeah it's like languages which don't have that like english for example you can't have a spelling bee in estonian because well you kind of can but like like english has spelling bees like competitions for children and such because like uh the language is very often when you pronounce the word it's very different from how it's written like from like how in my last video i just made a joke like how i wanted to say pear yeah yeah like pear as in two items or pear as in the fruit or pear as in the trim and such.

Like they pretty much sound exactly the same, but they're different. Yeah. There's obviously reasons for that. Yeah. Yeah. That, I, I, there, there's obviously reasons for that. And it's partially because English has, it's been a language that has so many influences in it. Yeah. You've taken,

it's this language that it's not, I think it's more fair to call English like a meta language. It's something that's taken so many influences and just merged it into itself and somehow it's managed to manage to work somehow but when you have a language that's only spoken in a single region or that region has been fairly closed off for a very long time you have much less of that variation probably yeah obviously i suppose like yeah i was gonna say japanese does have a problem now where uh it's it's basically becoming english with japanese grammar but oh yeah the loan words it's um yeah i was going to say that i suppose it's like i suppose it has a lot to do with the

writing system as well like uh i suppose not every alphabet just fits every language but they just use it like uh for example russian has Cyrillic i hope that's how you say it. And Russian is, it's kind of similar in the way that you don't always pronounce the characters the same way you do write them. Like for example, the O sound often gets converted into A. Like I can't bring any specific example right now because I haven't accessed my Russian in so long that I can't really recall any words. But, well, I can call it some. But, yeah, Russian has that with the A and O sound. But at the same time, I know, like, Chinese or Mandarin,

I think it had, like, the Romanji version of it was called like Binyin or something. And I think Binyin had some issues where the alphabet just didn't work. If you use the Latin words, I think they're called, I mean letters letters they just don't represent the chinese pronunciation well enough for for it to be consistent where there whereas there is like this alternative version i don't remember what it's called exactly but it's like an alternative version to basically give readings to Chinese, kind of like hiragana in Japanese. And it's like a completely different alphabet.

It's kind of like something that looks like katakana, basically. And it's supposed to be way more consistent than pinyin, which is like the romanization of Chinese. than Binyin, which is like the romanization of Chinese. So I think often there is this issue of mismatched alphabets in languages because every language which uses the same alphabet still sounds a bit different. Well, the same problem does exist. I don't know why people keep trying to do this.

When you are early on learning Japanese, you run into a lot of resources that try to Romanize the words rather than teaching you hiragana first. Because the problem you get with Romanizing the words is exactly that problem, where you have different resources that will interpret it in a slightly different way and there's just no consistency that can exist but japanese doesn't need to have that problem

because hiragana does exist yeah it's uh and like for some reason a lot of people have resistance against learning hiragana uh well which is not as common but i i've seen posts on reddit and on other forums of people asking like how far can they get in japanese like can they get fluent in japanese without learning hiragana at all like saying that they have already learned for like two months and they don't want to start learning hiragana and they only use romaji and it's like it's so weird to me because hiragana was like the easiest part of japanese i learned it in like two days i think with duolingo and it didn't take any effort at all yeah i feel the exact same way about honestly i'm surprised i managed to find two months worth

of work to do without learning hiragana yeah i don't even know how they find like the resources for that i guess okay if you want to count not being able to read anything and being able to speak maybe you can become fluent i don't know but not being able to read anything you're not going to get very far yeah it honestly feels so much more difficult as well. It's like if you want to look something up in a dictionary, you have to every time have to find the romanification of it as well. I suppose there is... Stick it in Google Translate, it's fine. Yeah.

I guess Google Translate does give a romanification of the writing as well. And I guess a lot of people have the same thing against kanji, which is way more common, though, than against hiragana, but a lot of people don't want to learn kanji at first. A very

common complaint, which I didn't include in the video against the Duolingo japanese course is that it starts throwing kanji at you pretty early on and a lot of people don't like that like even in the comments of like the lessons like lecture comments basically in duolingo i've always seen in the early stages how a lot of people complain about why are you showing us kanji already this is like the third lesson or something and to me it kind of feels weird like i feel like getting into kanji early on is a really like good idea in the sense that it i don't think you, other than maybe knowing hiragana,

you don't really need any prerequisites for getting familiar with kanji or learning words with kanji. Because if you don't, then basically what happens is those simplified news and stuff which the japanese government provides which is basically no kanji at all all hiragana and it's like horrible to read yeah it's it's so

impossible to read because it's so hard to tell what those words actually are because japanese has like so many words which are written the exact same way so without kanji you can't even tell what word it is and i remember i think the jlpt n4 and n5 tests also like n5 especially has like most of the like writing is hiragana and they don't include kanji at all because it seems that i suppose language classes like japanese language classes kind of teach in this way that they don't introduce kanji until later like they focus on full hiragana at first and i don't know it feels like it feels unnecessary i don't think you really gain anything from that and like i don't think there's no reason to i understand um wanting to mainly focus on hiragana

uh at least getting to the point where you're actually able to relatively quickly read it but i don't think there's any reason to avoid it because especially when you're reading stuff on your computer, there's plugins for your browser to add Furigana to basically any website. And if you can't read the kanji, there's ways you can get around that early on. And that actually will help you in some way to sort of understand the reading of that kanji while also not introducing the

problem of there being no word borders because you still don't know about grammar either so you have no idea how to read anything yeah i suppose it's like uh i suppose it can be like if it's focusing primarily on hiragana at first it's like can be good hiragana reading practice but at the same time i feel like you can still get the reading practice with furigana like you said but i suppose it's like language classes often focus on early output like speaking the language so maybe that's why they like don't focus so much on reading it yeah that's that seems how how it was when I I didn't do the Japanese class at my university, but I know some people

who did, and that seems to be the way they structured it as well. Like, they could read a little bit of, like, very, very basic kanji by the end, like numbers and things like that, but most of what they'd focused on was being able to do things like

have a very simple conversation yeah it seems to be that language classes i made a video about my experience with russian lessons as well for six years and it seems that classes they focus a lot on early output like i can kind of understand that because um they often language classes have a specific goal they want to get to and most people who take language classes i suppose are people who just like want to or need to output already like when you're learning on your own you have the freedom or flexibility of like only focusing

on input at first because you don't have a need to output unless you want to of course so you don't really need to focus on getting your output ability or grammar to be top-notch before you have like learned a nice amount of vocabulary and get an intuition in the language

because like in the russian lessons in like when i learned russian in school there was a such a huge focus on grammar and I had like no intuitive understanding of the language the language wasn't intuitive to me at all but the way it basically taught Russian was to like mathematically I had to like use these tables of conjugations and basically do addition of words like choose the correct conjugation and basically like output in that way and it's like it did get my grammar like i do remember that it did like i still remember some of the grammar pretty well like some of the conjugations but at the same time it's like i feel like i spent so much time on it and it was such a fucking miss oh i'm not sure if i can swear no you can say whatever you want i

don't care oh okay all right uh it was just such a miserable experience that i i absolutely hated russian in school it was so terrible and i assume a large part of it is because it's focusing on rote memorization of words and brute forcing grammar and i absolutely hate that that's why maybe that's why i still can't stand genki textbooks at all i just don't want to see that kind of stuff anymore i've heard a lot of good things about genki i might pick them up at some point um but I don't know I feel sort of the same way about it like I did a year of German in my early years of school but the nice thing about German is German is very similar to English so it's it's much oh sorry it's much harder it's much easier kind of speak my own language it's much easier uh to actually teach that to an English speaker.

It's sort of, at least early on, a lot of it is just sort of learning words. The grammar structure is very similar. Oh, yeah. But I don't remember any of that. I think I can remember like a couple of numbers and that's about it oh rip yeah i think like german was like one of those like one step above in difficulty in languages such as french when it came to an english speaker trying to learn it like it should about well this is like some random website estimate

like 750 hours to get quote-unquote fluent in german for an english native japanese being the hardest of course but yeah it's like i feel like if those if if you if somebody who is is an English native were to learn German, they're much better off focusing primarily on vocabulary at first and getting a feel for the language and then getting into the grammar. already similar to german i mean to english if german is already similar to english i feel like just knowing the vocabulary makes it already makes you already proficient enough in the language to like consume it at a pretty good like you can start immersing really early on if you just know certain vocabulary i suppose yeah it also does help that uh english as i was saying earlier is basically the language of loan words and a lot of there's a lot of german words already in english just pronounced slightly differently

oh okay yeah i guess a lot of languages take loanwords from Germany, it seems. We were talking about the kanji problem before. I think the reason why a lot of people are really afraid of kanji is because they look at how many words they need to learn and don't really look at a strategy to learn it. They just think, I have no idea how I'm going to learn 3,000 words. That seems impossible. Yeah. But there's all these strategies that exist now whether that's doing it through um one economy through an srs system

whether you do it through remembering memorizing the symbols uh but don't actually remember the readings and you just learn a i guess a lookup table of symbols and then afterwards you learn the readings or you start going from like vocabulary first there's there's all these ways you can approach it but if you just look at it as i'm gonna try to memorize 3000 symbols that that just seems impossible yeah i think a lot of people like even though srs and things like that are now like everywhere in terms of language learning communities but a lot of people still have the assumption that you have to learn languages in the same way you have to learn them in school so with rote memorization and things like that and yeah that's why everybody in i remember there's this like even in russian class i remember

the teacher once said that russian like when when a kid maybe it was me who messed up some like russian sentence or something and the teacher basically said that like come on russian ain't so hard it's not chinese or something but in reality i feel like chinese grammar is way simpler than russian grammar grammar it's just like you have to learn the words and of course if you if you try to rote memorize chinese characters then it's a fucking complete nightmare but i feel like if you use srs it's it's a completely different story like Like you said, I think WaniKani is a pretty good resource as well. I haven't used it myself. If anyone wants to get a WaniKani subscription,

just buy it at the end of the year because they always do a half-price sale. Oh, all right. I suppose WaniKani works in the way that it kind of like builds up, like bottom up, like it shows you the radicals first. Yeah. And then builds upon the other compounds. But the way I learned was basically, I just downloaded the core 2K deck, basically,

which is just like word. Like it shows you a word then it's reading and an example sentence and has audio for it and so basically i didn't learn kanji separately i do that now but i do it like one kanji per day and i don't it doesn't really feel like I keep forgetting them, basically. But at the same time, I haven't learned any radicals. I haven't really learned kanji, but I can read like 5,000 words without issues. I feel like it's pretty flexible how you learn kanji. Like I said, I didn't learn kanji separately and I didn't learn radicals or anything. I just learned the words and it seems to work.

Like it's probably not efficient as easy to memorize words when you haven't learned the kanji, but it seems to work still. So if you don't want to do that, you don't need to do it. You can just like learn the words directly and memorize like the the way

they look i i can say right now though that if you if you want to uh handwrite kanji in japanese then you probably have to learn kanji separately because i cannot handwrite any kanji at all i can't even handwrite like hiragana and katakana because I haven't practiced it. I think you can handwrite one kanji. If you can't do the kanji for one, I'd be really sad. Okay, well, yeah, sure. I guess I can do those. One, two, and three. If you can't do those, I'd be really worried.

Yeah. But no, I get your point. Yeah. I haven't started with handwriting either. I feel like if I'm going to learn handwriting, then it's going to be the last thing. Like, it's... I haven't had a single need for it yet,

but I assume if I were to, like, let's say, I don't know, move to Japan, then it would be very, very necessary. For sure. Yeah, that would would be very, very necessary. For sure. Yeah, that would definitely be the case. I personally don't have any interest in doing that. I'm learning Japanese entirely for my weeb reasons.

No, nothing else. For sure, that's what most people do. Yeah. Honestly, I've been thinking of this, like, maybe i actually want to kind of make a video on this as well but like the reasons to learn a language like for no reason at all is a completely valid reason because a lot of people get stuck on this idea that when you learn a language it has to be practical it has to like uh like which language should i learn which language is

the most valuable to learn like then people say oh you should learn chinese because chinese is the language of the future and whatever and um it's like i feel like most people who learn will start learning a language with the assumption that it's going to be practical for them with no other reasons at all, they're most likely going to give up at some point because it's just not worth the effort. And you are way more likely to actually get fluent in the language if you just enjoy learning it.

If you just learn it for fun, or if you just like look forward to doing something in the language, like you said, like the weeb reasons. For me, it's quite a lot because I just enjoy learning a language and I just enjoy learning Japanese. And it has like a novelty to it. I have some, I'm like a really low level weeb myself. Like I don't want, I don't watch that much anime, but I do watch it sometimes. And I suppose when I get more fluent in Japanese, then I'll watch way more,

especially when it comes to immersion. I'll have to start doing that basically. And there's a lot of fun content in Japanese, i which i'd like to access basically the same way with russian like when i started learning russian again um what i looked forward to was basically browsing the russian internet like just exploring the russian youtube and uh like forums and things like that. Because knowing the language kind of opens a door for you to another world, in a way. So when I started learning Japanese,

I have actually spent a lot of time just for fun, watching videos about Japanese culture, about Japanese as a language, about some random, I don't know, just aspects of Japan, like hobbies people have and things like that. And before I didn't really have that drive to watch things like that, but just learning the language, like starting to learn it basically brought the interest in those to me as well. Yeah, with immersion, if you're not enjoying the content you're trying to consume,

then I would, if I didn't enjoy anime, I wouldn't watch anime to try to do immersion. That would be a horrible, horrible idea. You'd end up giving up really quickly. And it's going to be true for anything else. For example, I could use Japanese news for immersion, but I would give up after two days because that sounds incredibly boring.

So if you can find a language, and this goes back to the idea of learning a language for just for the sake of it being practical if you're trying to do that and you're not actually enjoying the experience you realize that a lot of like the language learning process is really boring and especially the point where you're not making much progress luckily in the early stages i'm still making quite a bit but i do hear there's like a a wall you'll eventually get to in japanese where you know enough that you can sort of understand stuff and you are at the point now where you're not really making any like visible progress and if you're

yeah if you're not enjoying the just i guess the if you're not enjoying the grind and enjoying like the content you're trying to use for immersion there's no way you're going to keep it up yeah absolutely like uh i actually talked about this as well in like two videos i made uh one thing was when i learned russian in school i had no motivation to learn russian at all so that was like if I had at least been motivated to learn Russian maybe Russian wouldn't have been so terrible in school but I absolutely hated it in every way because I didn't even want to learn it maybe if you had Russian yeah maybe but like afterwards after I had graduated and like after I started learning Russian on my own it was a completely different thing like then i started like seeking out things which are fun in russian and like

and then the novelty like of knowing russian started like showing how it can be fun and whatever and the same thing in like japanese um like you said the immersion part and the intermediate i suppose hell intermediate hell or something where you aren't making visible progress i feel like for me i'm not sure if i've hit that yet like i assume i kind of have but at the same time i kind of i feel like it doesn't hit me mentally that much because i don't expect like i'm already aware of that that and i don't expect to be fluent or like competent until maybe a few years from now like i suppose i have patience for that so well you did six years of r Russian so it's not like it's your first time yeah I did six years of Russian and basically became the same level I was in Japanese

in like six months or something because it was like extremely inefficient the way the classes work but um so basically i feel like the way i learn japanese is like i could have started immersing way earlier i still don't immerse enough basically but it's because i'm kind of like doing debris grind like i feel like i feel like it's not that necessary to immerse when you don't even have a proper vocabulary built up. You can immerse and it definitely will be beneficial. But I feel like you get so much more benefit out of immersion when you already have a decent vocabulary. Just because like you can comprehend way more, way faster.

And you don't have to spend like most of the time just understanding nothing and looking up words and like uh i feel like i've noticed this already as well like when i i haven't really immersed that much before but now when i do immersion like i started watching this uh YouTube series on in Japanese and basically even the first 10 videos or so I watch I feel like I'm picking up so much stuff like it's words I already know but just like the way he uses those words and like the expressions he makes with those words like how he like what kinds of words he overuses and like look like those patterns like like how i say like a lot right now i things like that yeah if people who watch my videos know that

i say so way too much if you do a drinking game where you drink every time i say so you will die in like 10 minutes um it's i i have the exact same problem i try to counteract it and whenever i counteract it i switch it up with another word it's it's one of those words that um one of those things where you're trying to feel a bit of air time and you're not really sure what to say so i think it's better than saying um um i find to be really annoying but feeling over like like or so it it seems better in your head until someone points it out to you and then you realize, wait, no, this is

just as bad, isn't it? Yeah, kind of. And actually, interestingly enough, like those it was something specific, like what it was called in Japanese, but basically those words like those filler words like ano eto like using those actually makes you sound way more fluent

or like native like than if you just like were completely silent or say like the english equivalent of those like speaking japanese and then suddenly saying um and so on i think it makes sense in in a real world conversation it's when you are trying to make videos and that comes across that's when i think it becomes a bit of a problem but that's not most people don't have to deal with that issue yeah it's actually funny like people actually use those filler words so many times like um they don't even know this in when they listen or say those but like when you do transcribing like when you write subtitles for a show or video or something and uh now people are automating those with like algorithms like deep learning

machine learning when you check them when you activate the automatic subtitles on youtube youtube cuts all those like ums and words like that out of the script and that's actually like a huge problem in uh i don't remember what it was called, like stop words or something in machine learning, like removing those um sounds and stuff from the script because they are really unnecessary. So if you have like text, I mean, speech to text, you don't really want it to be filled with filler words all the time.

I think the one issue that happens when you do start to remove those words from a script, and this is a problem that I I didn't realise until I started learning about grammar, is a lot of those things actually do mean something, but you'll try, like I didn't realise

what Dane meant until like a couple of days ago when i started going through take him's guide i was like wait that's a way you can like end a sentence with a uh a question looking for a positive answer i i had no idea because i'd try to like look it up and i couldn't find anything on it but the second you you realize that like wait that makes perfect sense doesn't it you realize that like wait that makes perfect sense doesn't it yeah

those those have some specific name as well like the sentence ending words yeah yeah I kind of term for it and yeah like I feel like those are

something that you need to get immersion in like even not like uh from shows or movies or anime but like even something like youtube videos or just real life conversations because the way people like when you have never heard how people actually use them it's like you don't really know how should you use them. Like if I write the sentence and say like, and use ne at the ending, does it sound natural or does it sound weird? Like when I wrote some sentences

and I put ne in the ending, one of my Japanese, like my Japanese friend basically said that it kind of sounds like really feminine. And I didn't even realize that. And so now I've been listening or watching some like YouTube videos in Japanese and it's like, they actually use those all the time,

those endings. And I guess that's a nice way to get an understanding of those. Mm-hmm. endings and i guess that's a nice way to get an understanding of those and going back to the um the idea of early immersion one of the there's one benefit of actually doing that really early even if you don't really understand the words that are being said it's for listening practice oh yeah um for sure like because you can't really determine what sound you're really hearing, it's going to be much harder to, I guess, go through that later on

when you actually do understand the vocabulary. Yeah. I actually had issues with listening before. I couldn't really pick up anything through listening. Not anything, but my listening ability wasn't that great before until I like actually immersed a bit more and now I feel it's all right whereas like I had a friend who also learned Japanese who like he watched like a thousand episodes of anime, like one piece or something. And when you immerse with true listening so much, you basically, even though your vocabulary might

be not as strong as someone else's, your listening ability will be way stronger. And that was an issue I had, which was lacking for me for sure and so I can definitely say that if you care about listening then it's good to get some listening practice early on too I think that's one of the the few things about Japanese I might actually be decent at because I oh lord I've watched like too much anime. So in my early days, I would watch basically everything that was airing, and I looked at my list,

and there's like 300 days worth of stuff watched. Which is too much. I wouldn't recommend it, especially when most of it wasn't very good. But it does definitely give you an advantage to give you an opportunity sorry give you an opportunity to listen to like native speaker native speakers speak even though what they're saying and the vocabulary they're using isn't really what you're going to hear a lot of the time in um i guess regular conversations it still lets you because of how strict Japanese is with the way that

the sounds are actually made it still gives you the opportunity to work out how the language actually sounds yeah it makes you familiar with the sounds of the language let's see what else do we have in here?

Oh, okay, so how are you actually, like, what resources are you actually using for learning Japanese right now? Okay, so I'm still mainly using the same deck, which I have been using since my first two weeks of Japanese. So the core 2K and 6K Japanese vocabulary, like optimized order or whatever. Like it was some common deck, which was like my friend used it. So I started using it as well when I got started. And it's a pretty common deck. It actually came from like like i guess it's like

stolen content actually i'm not really sure but it's like i guess they're from i know that jp like a website for learning japanese well i'm not going to encourage it but you can get uh someone has extracted all of one ikani out into Anki deck. I'm not going to tell you how to find it. You can find it though. Yeah, it's basically something similar. Basically something extracted from a website. And I'm like, I just want to finish that. I'm like, I have only less than a thousand words to go and I'm taking five new words per day.

I used to take 10 and then that got overwhelming so I took six and then that got overwhelming so I now I'm taking five which is like a sweet spot right now so I want to finish that and after before I used to like I have a lot of different donkey decks as well which I've made myself mostly like um like some some grammar points such as conjugations like like past form te form passive form um things like that and then i have a i took the same the day kim's uh grammar guide and the complete guide to Japanese I also read through that the way that what I think about the Dae Kim's book is that I feel like it's not necessary to like memorize everything at at first like I feel like reading through the book even if you like

forget everything almost right after it's still fine because what it basically does is it kind of like when you encounter something some grammatical like concept in immersion or wherever you might remember that something similar was covered in the book so you can basically look it up in the book and get more explanations from there so basically that's what i did i read through it forgot everything but i kind of remembered if something was covered or not and that's why like that's how basically i learned grammar i'm not fluent in grammar like i feel like learning grammar early on it's not like i did like focus way more on it early on like when getting started i think that's fine because otherwise you're just going to be lost in the language but um like the more advanced grammar and stuff you don't have to learn that

early i feel like it's better if you like are aware of it but if you don't really understand it yet i think it's okay because you'll probably understand it with immersion over time and after i finish the core 2k 6k deck i think then so in like 200 days or something i think then i'm going to start focusing on immersion a lot like um then that's the time where it's time to have fun basically with the language and then i'm going to make basically mind sentences and vocabulary and whatever through through immersion and see what happens. So to give a short rundown again, I basically don't use anything other than the core 2k, 6k deck right now. And some decks I've made myself

and sometimes I still visit the Teikim's Guide to Grammar. The way that I'm working through Te take him right now is after every chapter what i'll do is i'll go back through the examples that were there and then as i was saying earlier i try to like play around with what was there so for example with the uh with the chapter on what let's just pick one uh let's say sentence ending particles so this is uh you're you had the same one we talked about yeah yeah oh okay we'll go with a different example let's go with uh adjectives yeah we'll go with adjectives um so this goes over e and uh na adjectives so i'll go back through the examples that were there,

because Take Him does a good job with including a conversation that you would see happen, and then try to go through that and change up the conversation, but maybe make it about some different topic or something like that, just so I can, I guess, more uh the the knowledge about the grammar rules but i don't as as you were saying i i don't think even by the end of this i'm gonna remember everything perfectly and then when i come across things i don't know i could go back and say okay well is this thing that i know i covered but i'm not exactly sure the way you're supposed to handle it yeah exactly pretty much like uh that's pretty

much how i did it as well like early on i focused way more on reading the book and i i like for example the same adjectives uh section it has like the e adjectives and not adjectives and they have like certain rules like certain words need to use the knob particle before uh the noun and whatever and i feel like i didn't ever really like try to brute force memorize those rules and because it's like now that i've gotten more intuition in the language, I feel like it comes naturally. I automatically put the na before the noun when it's necessary, even though I don't even think about it. It just automatically pops into my head that it sounds more natural if I add the na particle there. But my output isn't that great, assume because i haven't really i don't think

it's a problem either that my output is not perfect but uh because it's like uh it just improves over time by getting uh better intuition in the language one way that i see like in a lot of places it's difficult to find you know native speakers of a language because you're not in the country where people would natively speak it. But one way I see that has been quite popular with lots of viral videos happening of it is people playing VR chat and going into some of the language-specific rooms. That seems to be a fairly decent way to find people who actually, if not native speakers, at least people who are fluent in the

language yeah uh i've actually done that with japanese uh i haven't really spoken myself but i visited vr chat and i've like listened uh just like out of curiosity and uh just explored around and yeah there are a lot of like i know certain servers which had like a lot of japanese people like almost like crowded um in the place and yeah it's like it's a genuine way to basically have a conversation or listen to a natural conversation or just have fun in a way. Like I assume it's much less stressful as well because the game is kind of like meme-y and stuff. So yeah, it's a decent resource, I suppose.

Like something to visit from time to time for fun. I would definitely be in the same position of uh not saying anything i could i can do a a self-introduction that i prepared earlier but that's about as far as i'm gonna get with that yeah i guess like um i have like some level of like I kind of like prefer just listening or getting input right now instead of outputting like I could but it's like at the same time it's like

I already know that I kind of suck and that I will be better later on but so I kind of haven't really done that like I'm in a server basically which has a lot of Japanese. Like I'm in a server basically, which is, which has a lot of Japanese natives and I actually read the server for quite a lot, but I don't like actually talk anything in there at all. I had, I don't say send a single message, but I think it's fine.

Like I actually tried speaking or talking or writing like way earlier, like a year ago. And it was pretty painful in the sense that if I just want to say something simple, I often end up trying to fact check myself. Like, is this the correct grammar? Is this the right vocabulary? And so on.

Even output feels so much more painful early on than if i just like knew it more naturally already so i think i think i'm pretty big on like late output the same way with english basically um like spoken english i actually haven't spoken English almost at all in my life other than English classes like even like in video games I barely ever spoke English like with English natives and so that's kind of why when I started like the most I've spoken English in my life is probably the YouTube videos I'm making now and there is like a clear improvement from my first video to my last video and I hope like with more practice and so on like my English keeps on improving like my spoken English and that's like I feel like if my even though my English isn't perfect by any means, like spoken English,

I still have an accent and whatever. I stumble on my words sometimes. But I feel like if I got more practice, it will probably improve way more than it. My English would be much smoother than it is right now. But at the same time, if my Japanese ended up being like my English is currently, But at the same time, if my Japanese ended up being like my English is currently, without me even really trying to output, like, practice spoken English or spoken Japanese at all, I would be pretty happy. Like, I think it's all right if you have, like, some level of accent in Japanese,

if, like, you're okay with it. But I feel like my English is, like, a good example of how you don't really need to go out your way and like get early speaking practice but I suppose in some ways it can be hard if you if you start speaking from like if you start speaking early and you start like your get into the habit of pronouncing some letters or sounds differently like your tongue position like for example how i say the t in uh english my tongue is like in the middle of my roof but i think like the mouth of the middle of my mouth basically but I think it should be behind my teeth for example uh I feel like those are kind of bad habits but this is back to the uh the problem of being a native speaker I had to

think about that for a moment yeah that that does sound about right yeah like I guess i should like if i wanted to really improve my english output right now like spoken english i i'd have to like start looking into how should my tongue be positioned and stuff like that and maybe maybe getting like that knowledge from early on can be useful though like right now i just don't really like i intuitively can tell that my english uh is wrong in some aspects like i just try to i know what what it's supposed to sound like in my head but when i say it it just sounds different because and i don't really know what's wrong until i realize oh my tongue is in the wrong position and so on well what i'll say is that

if you don't bother to do anything with your English, it's better than some people I know who are native speakers. So it's perfectly fine. Well, I guess I can communicate at least. Well, I think it does help you've been doing it for a very long time and if you had done the same thing with japanese how long have you been speaking or learning english for i guess uh i guess from i think guess i started in like 2008 in school but before that i got like some like a tiny bit of English immersion from games already.

So I guess like 13 years, I suppose. Yeah, I would hope that you would be at a decent level after 13 years of Japanese then. Yeah, for sure. Like, I remember when I started English lessons, like in school, I remember when I started English lessons in school, I had already picked up some words from, quote-unquote, immersion from before that. I had played some English games and so on.

And I remember I used to ask the teacher, wait, isn't this written a different way? Like the word, like, what's up? I used to think, like, as a kid, that it's spelled like W-A-S-S-U-P. Like, what's up? Instead of what's up. And the teacher got actually really angry. Like, if I say it's written like this, it's written like this. Stop asking me if it's written a different way.

Because, yeah, I actually was really excited to learn English, I suppose, because, like, everything I liked was in English, so. I don't know what it is about just learning anything in school, but it just makes it far, far more boring. Even if it's something you really enjoy like i i first started uh programming in high school and i found the classes to just be just obnoxiously boring and yeah when i went on to do it by myself and then going to do it at a university it was a much much different experience especially the university

because it's much more i guess especially with my degree much more self-directed learning oh um i was saying but yeah i don't know what it is about that like there's there's certain topics i've learned i learned at school which going back and looking at it it's something i would really enjoy but maybe it's just this way that classes are structured or maybe it's something about the school environment that i don't know do you have any thoughts on that yeah like well there are like multiple reasons i suppose like for example r Russian, like I said before, I just didn't have interest in learning the language,

and I was forced to do it. And it was fucking hard as well. So it just put me off learning Russian. It just was an uncomfortable experience. But at the same time, a lot of different classes as well, in school, they have a bottom-up approach so it's like they get into the really low level details at first before they get into like um uh like the good parts like this um there's when i was learning deep learning

uh i used this course called Fast AI. And the premise of the course is basically that instead of teaching you how deep learning works on the low level, they instead do it top down. So at first, they let you play with the networks and then they teach how it works. So the analogy is basically that if you if you made kids instead of uh letting them play baseball you started teaching them how like physics work behind throwing a ball or like pitching, then they will instantly get bored of it and not like baseball.

But in reality, like baseball is like playing the game, not the fine details. You can learn the fine details later. You don't need to learn them right now. And the same way with math, like a lot of, I've heard a lot of people complain how like schools make math look terrible, just really boring. They remove the art of math from math itself by basically teaching it bottom up and never showing the real beauty of math.

And I feel like that's what schools do for every subject. They just go bottom up instead of top down. They don't give the big picture to you like why like why physics can be exciting or why math can be nice and like and at the same time i feel like uh the way school works is it basically tries to prepare you for science like uh for for research and stuff like that but it never really explains it and if i had like that knowledge back then maybe i would have been way more like interested in learning stuff in school than i was

i remember i asked teachers why are we learning this like why do we need this in life and they none of them like I was that annoying kid who always asked that and none of them like knew how to answer that to the point where they just got annoyed annoyed and told me to like stop asking that so yeah I had like no motivation in school at all but if i were to go back right now to school i would be much more motivated because i like see the big picture now like for example something like biology would be way more exciting for me now than it is than it was in the past and the same way with like stem areas like physics and math and so on yeah that that definitely does make sense i'm thinking back on when i did my uh my ai class and it's definitely did start from the ground up because the first i think

six weeks were on probability theory and uh phase theorem which is just really boring especially when you're not sure how it actually can be used to what you're be used in like ai you're like okay well this is how this is how all these mathematical functions work but what exactly is the point of this yeah like exactly it's like um when i started learning machine learning i i also like read from everywhere that you need to know probability and statistics and you need to know calculus and linear algebra and stuff like that. And I also learned like probability and statistics at first. I did a course on that. And then I was like, this is like so boring.

I kind of want to get into the good stuff already. this is like so boring i kind of want to get into the good stuff already so i started doing some ai course and it was like i didn't really it was just ai not machine learning so it was like those uh breath for like depth first search and uh yeah those ones like algorithms and that wasn't also what i wanted to learn even though people said that you should learn those first before you start learning machine learning but i just at one point i was like, okay, fuck it. I'm just going to try this machine learning course. And if it's too hard, then I'll go back and learn like math and stuff. But what I discovered is that I actually didn't need the math. Like I actually became competent in like solving problems with AI without needing to know calculus uh like

to that level to like I don't really need to understand how back propagation works to know how to use deep learning like that was like way more motivating than having this barrier of needing to learn all these prerequisites and I feel feel like it's the same with learning languages in school. They try to teach you grammar and stuff like that so early on instead of letting you build an intuition or letting you play around with language or giving you the big picture of the language. This takes us all the way back to where we started

with when you do self-learning, you can sort of direct it exactly the way that you want to direct it. Yeah. It's, I like self-learning like programming classes or like uh i actually really liked i really like video editing like i said before but when i when i had classes for video editing in school i hated it like right away like it's kind of weird like i was surprised myself like wow this really sucks like i was not motivated at all. I just like learning on my own and doing what I want. I'm making what I want to make instead of like, okay, make this specific one video which has these elements in it.

That isn't what I want to make. I want to experiment with my own ideas and things like that. So what I find is that when I'm forced to do something, like when I'm told what I need to do, then I just lose motivation somehow. With directing yourself, I think this is one of the benefits you get from, you know, platforms like YouTube. Because if you want to go learn, you how i don't know some random part of ai works without having to go through an entire course there there'll be say like 10 or 20 maybe even hundreds of videos on

something like back propagation and you can go and learn about that specific concept or if you want to go i don't know you you want to suffer and go learn bayes theorem there'll be something specifically on that and you can go and consume that in the order you actually want to consume it yeah and like i kind of like online courses as well like uh like how i just like if there's something specific i want to learn i can just take a specific course on it like linear linear algebra and probability and statistics and stuff like that but in college or in school often it's like you have um you have like um those few classes that you feel like you need but very often you have to take like other classes as well which you don't need you just have to take them and especially in like

high school and stuff like that like how we had music classes for like 12 years wow yeah it's it's not even like playing instruments or anything it's like i don't know like like music theory yeah kind of yeah and like um just learning facts like what year was like yeah like yeah if you want to make school really boring get get kids to memorize specific dates yeah it was like learning dates and stuff like that and like um i guess some parts were fun in the sense that uh like it's nice to have the cultural knowledge but at the same time i feel like it's way more exciting to learn those things on your own than it is to like being forced to learn those. Yeah, and when you have a...

It's a bit harder with high school and before that, because there's usually a much more rigid of a structure of what they have to teach. I don't know what it's like for you, but Australia has a curriculum that teachers have to teach towards. has a like a curriculum that teachers have to teach towards um but once you move past that into university then it's really dependent on the sort of teach you end up getting i've had some lecturers who actually really understood like learning dates there's no reason to be doing that here in the first week of the class he said if i would fail my own exam i'm not going to make that exam and he doesn't remember he has no ability to remember dates so he's like i'm not going to put him in there i'm going to structure in a way that you're going to be i think that that course was on like the fundamentals of computing so it was going over things like okay uh what are the

different types of ram what exactly is a cpu how does that function things like that but it's not like hey when was the first intel cpu developed things like that yeah yeah that's like that's nice like when when teachers have like their own way of teaching rather than doing what they were like told to do like by the curriculum and so on uh i find a lot of like a lot of teachers are just stuck to the curriculum and don't really don't really have the to learn when the teacher themselves has like this uh drive to teach because they like the field rather than because it's their job and that's just how they have to do it yeah i've i definitely noticed a lot of the older teachers were definitely much better at teaching. I think the best teacher I had for maths was this guy in his 60s or 70s.

Obviously, he still had to teach the curriculum, but he would also show us practical examples of of how the the formulas we're learning could actually be used and i think that that especially when you're younger definitely helps i guess show you why something actually makes sense to learn rather than just like okay today we're gonna learn how this part of linear algebra works where you don't really have any any uh i guess any point to ground it on and i think the same is definitely true for like kanji as well like if you just learn individual kanji by itself i think it's very difficult to see why that's useful but if you're learning kanji and

then also learning some vocabulary that's actually using it i think it makes it much more entertaining to learn and makes it i guess stick more as well yeah it's like uh actually like before i said that i only use the core 2k 6k deck but i actually use rtk as well to learn kanji uh i'm not very serious about it but sometimes like i'm most of the kanji i already like have encountered but but sometimes I get like a kanji, which I've never seen before in any words. And then it's like, like, is this even a real,

like, is this, is this kanji even used anywhere? Like, it's like way cooler to like learn, like have knowledge where that kanji is used rather than just having it on its own. And yeah,

the same thing about like the math like i remember like i said before i always use like ask the teachers like why is this useful like where like how are we going to use this like when i asked that in like um in high school it was a completely different experience like the teacher actually like answered the question instead of getting like triggered so when i asked about let's say uh linear algebra like matrixes and stuff uh then she actually like knew how to answer that like those are used in computing in like um i don't remember exactly what she said but something to do with scripting and so on uh and that's like way more motivating to actually like if you if you

if if there's like any answer at all to as to why something you're learning can be useful there is instantly way more motivation than if if it just like, oh, you need it in a test. That's it. That's always the best answer. Yeah. Like most of the time when I asked that question in like the previous school was like, oh, you need that to get into, like, you need that for the final exam and if you don't learn this you can't get into high school like okay well sure i got that much you don't you didn't tell me that

i sort of understood that but can you like tell me why give me a bit more context here yeah that that's sort of what separates a good and a bad teacher someone who's just doing it because it's a job and someone who actually genuinely enjoys the thing they're trying to teach yeah absolutely it's like kind of goes to show

if like the teacher themselves like has an actual like proper education in the field like do they see the big picture do they have the experience with it and so on yeah i've definitely run into some um a big problem i found with teachers at university you had some because i came from uh i was doing programming you had some who had actually worked in industry and then you had other people who they went to university to become a professor, basically.

And I felt like those people were the ones who really didn't have a proper way to actually show why something's actually going to be useful. But I guess that just comes from the fact they don't really have that much experience actually working with themselves. So they're still only just a little bit further ahead than the students they're actually teaching yeah it's like often often like teachers have especially teachers who teach like many different subjects and classes they have pretty much exactly the amount of knowledge you need to pass the class and

nothing beyond that but yeah in in my school as well when um when i like in programming classes and things like that uh there were a lot of teachers like most of the teachers were clearly hadn't worked in the field or hadn't worked in the field for like i don't know 20 years yeah yeah so they were like always teaching like really obsolete stuff like action script like flash oh okay actually i want what did you learn in your programming classes because i thought mine were bad but if that's what you if that's what you learned then uh i feel like it was even worse yeah i had Yeah, I had like a lot of classes. One of them was like web development.

And they were basically like, at first it was like JavaScript and like, well, JavaScript and HTML, but it's like the way the first few classes were basically like the teacher put a screenshot like with a projector with a screenshot of code onto the wall basically and then our task was to basically type the code into our computers and And it was like 100 lines of HTML and CSS and stuff like that.

And you had to write all that manually. And there was no explanations, nothing. And the point of the exercise was basically that the teacher said that, OK, this will basically teach you how to type. And that's pretty much it. And all the other lessons with the same teacher were basically like, okay, here is some JavaScript task, like an exercise from 1995.

So go do those and try to figure it out yourself. I'm not going to help you if you get stuck because, uh, otherwise you won't learn how to problem solve yourself. Also known as I don't actually know how to help you. Yeah. Basically the teacher didn't do anything at all. He just gave like tasks and, um, and like, he clearly hadn't either worked in the industry

or for a really long time. This was in 2015, where he said, in professional environments, nobody uses a script for HTML. Nobody uses text editors. Everybody uses like Adobe Dreamweaver or something, which was like, I don't even know if people use that anymore. No one uses. I don't know of a single person that uses Dreamweaver.

I don't know if it's even still being updated. Yeah. Yeah. And the same teacher was the one who basically had those action script classes like adobe flash he had like uh two weeks of full time like um basically the entire week was like eight hours of action script and um that was for two weeks that was like a practical uh period and um basically i asked at one point i asked the teacher why are we learning like flash like action script because this is like don't they say that flash is going to die soon or something and then the teacher was like

instantly a bit triggered because basically what he said that was um like flash will never die and the fact that people say that flash will die is just like some wet dream of nerds and it will never die and then now in like 2021 it's pretty much dead well yeah i just looked up flash dead and the first article that came up is adobe flash is dead here's what that means yeah it's like it's so clear that it's like either he's not up to date with the field or doesn't really have proper experience in it himself so it's like after the school for like three years of like web development and stuff like that the only people who actually knew how to code after that were the people who learned on their own yeah the people who just learned what were in the like the class contents they still had like

no clue what was going on basically so it was like was like, I don't know, kind of a joke. Wow. I thought, okay, now that's way worse. I was at least like learning how to program, but we were using kind of older technologies. So most of what we were doing for the web dev class was things like a couple of versions old of ASP.NET and the older version of angular which nobody uses

anymore but that's that's way worse yeah angular js yeah like uh oh yeah that reminds me like i actually wanted to say that there was like one teacher who came later who was like actually somebody had that had a job like actually he had like a lot of very often classes were canceled because he had to do something in his job so this was like a side job for him like the teaching and that was like a completely different experience because that was like uh it was like beginning like uh intro to web development i mean uh web design so it was like at the time it was really modern to use bootstrap so he like actually showed okay we're going to use bootstrap and here's how you do it and so on instead of like um right like every line of css yourself yeah basically the the teacher who we had before that was there

was no good practices or anything there was no mindset it was just like uh make a circle in sv like make a svg circle in html and then make an svg house in html like you had to draw a house with svg in html like that's like i don't know oh my god doesn't teach you the mindset or like good practices or like it doesn't get you prepared to be a software developer it just shows you the syntax basically well it's not even a sensible idea because if you want to draw a house in svg there are graphics applications you can draw a house in and then just copy over the uh the html yeah and like it doesn't even explain what an svG is or like where it's actually used in. It's just like, okay, just draw a house in SVG.

That's how you like draw stuff in HTML. Okay. The other problem I had was teachers who are very set on doing things their one way. That does make sense for like certain things. But when it comes to programming, there's generally like three or four different answers for any given problem yeah and i had um i had one lecture i was for my uh my big data class we were doing some some python scripting for for data analysis and the entire class realized that the solution that uh he was giving made absolutely no sense and uh we actually got to the point where we actually went to like his superior because he

ended up i think failing the entire class because oh actually i was failing so this class no it's half the class sorry so the class was made up of data scientists and programmers all of the programmers realized that the solution that he was offering um made no sense and would be really really slow and all of them were failed but in reality he just didn't care about like how fast the code ran because his his answer was oh if you're doing big data stuff ultimately the other speed doesn't matter because the company you're working for is accepting that it's going to take two weeks to run the code but the difference was like it was a one line change that made it so much faster and he just didn't want to accept it.

Luckily, we ended up kind of forcing him to accept it, but yeah, you run into people like that for sure. Yeah, it's i suppose a lot of like teachers get into some position without being like properly educated in the field themselves and since like very often nobody really knows like getting into like programming is one of those fields which is uh very different from other fields that you learn in school in the sense that the real reality of programming like working in a company is so different from like the theory and working on working in like computer science learning computer science in school is like a completely different thing like real worth real life experience versus school and like what i find is that a lot of very often the way teachers in college teach programming is basically basically through like mathematics like uh you have to do like a math exercise

to pass your uh programming class essentially instead of like teaching you how to actually program and what's like the what's important in programming like in terms of like good practices and whatever. It's basically just usually teaching you syntax. I think the best classes I had were the ones that the lectures, they were sort of going over a lot of the syntax stuff, but then the assignments they ended up offering were very much like something actually practical. Like one of my classes, I think it was my iOS development class. We had to make a travel app

that would basically show you a bunch of tourist attractions. And while he provided the data to us and told us like how it was structured, we were sort of given free reign on how to actually structure the app. But we were also being graded on things like how like the app was designed so it sort of encouraged the students to go and

actually look at how similar apps were made and what actually made sense for like ui design choices in that case yeah yeah learning by example is like, in terms of real life projects is a great way to learn. And I feel like, like, having students do their own projects is also like a great way to learn, because I feel like I learned programming mostly through just doing random experimentations and random projects on my own. doing random experimentations and random projects on my own and um and also you know you said that it was like uh you had to use a map for like tourist destinations for some reason i feel like schools always make some kind of exercise where you have to use a map like google maps api or something i i know like one person who had it in college i I had it in my school, and you had it. It seems like a very common exercise. I don't know, maybe because it's something relatively easy to work with. I don't know.

Yeah, it's probably kind of common, I suppose, as well, kind of useful. Like often like in terms of web development, like web design, you very often have like those landing pages for businesses and the business ones like their, I suppose, their office on the map or something embedded into the website. Yes, definitely true. Let's go back to one of the earlier things for a bit. With the way that classes are structured, one thing we didn't really touch on is the problem with a lot of classes is they're sort of geared towards the slower people in the class.

They're not really there to... If you're someone who likes to work ahead of the class, you're always going to feel like you're not really getting that much out of it, especially in the case of programming. If you're doing your own projects on the side, you're always going to be way, way ahead of what you're actually learning.

And I imagine the same would be true for language classes as well, where if you are doing a lot of your immersion stuff and sort of learning the language outside of the class you're going to end up being just way ahead of everybody else especially way ahead of the the course content itself yeah like absolutely like that's also what i brought up in like my russian video is that basically the classes move at the pace of either the slowest or fastest student or at the pace that the teacher decides so it's like it's like really weird it's like uh it's not really personalized like that's the issue and i feel like i kind of feel like in general language classes should be

a supplement rather than like uh like i feel like it's a good idea just because the way language classes work is that they often focus so much on grammar and like rote learning words and stuff like that that and exercises output exercises that i feel like it's a good idea to learn on your own so that the language class will be more beneficial because if like if you move at the pace of the class i feel like the like you move too fast grammatically but you don't build up the intuition for the language but if you study the language on your own you already have motivation to learn the language you have you are building an intuition for the language you have a better vocabulary so perhaps the output exercises in the class

are more beneficial and i suppose you can ask the teacher like questions you might have encountered yourself. And I suppose that way language classes can be pretty useful, but doing like using only language classes to learn without doing any supplemental studying on your own, I feel like that's just not going to work. I think this is why I see more people recommend supplemental studying on your own i feel like that's just not going to work i think i think this is why i see more people recommend getting a tutor rather than doing japanese classes because

with a tutor you can sort of like obviously you're not gonna learn everything from the tutor but you're gonna when you have those lessons you can sort of like get the tutor up to speed like where you're at right now and sort of work from there rather than having to work around what other people are learning around you yeah it's like direct one-on-one time and stuff like that yep definitely true like yeah and i feel like another big like a big issue that we had also and i feel like this is really common with language classes especially in like um in like as um as an extra class in school rather than a direct language class is like holiday breaks and vacations like they are great but at the same time like i always waited for the vacations because that means i don't need to learn Russian anymore. But what that means is basically that I don't need to learn Russian anymore. So I don't learn Russian for three months during the summer.

And then I have forgotten pretty much everything that I learned. So I'll have to learn it again when the next year starts. when the next year starts so i feel like it's much more beneficial to learn a language uh continuously like uh every day or at least every week so you don't like forget uh the words you had learned you don't get rusty and so on but if you suddenly have like a three-month break every year, it's like, I feel like that's actually one of the biggest issues with language classes, at least in the way we had them in school. If you don't do any learning on your own, it's just like, it's just an incomplete way of learning a language. And it just like, yeah it like that's the issue like it's incomplete

but it could be way more beneficial if it was like a bit more optimized i see people making very like similar complaints um like on the oney forums they'll say oh i i had some like commitments i had to get to for a couple of months then they'll realize they've forgotten like a lot of the recent stuff they've learned well they might still remember a lot of the early stuff because the early stuff you've sort of gone through the srs system far more often but a lot of like the recent levels they've gone through they they've completely forgotten and end up just resetting. And the problem with resetting is then you start redoing the content

that you already know and you're going to get yourself into that cycle where you're not really learning anything that's really interesting you because it's just the same stuff you already learned. So it's a hard thing to get back into if you've decided to take a break for some reason so the hard yeah if you can keep it up that's when you're gonna make like actual progress but once you decide to take that break or whatever reason you have to take a break that's when there's gonna be some serious issues getting back into it yeah i actually made a point on this as well in like my i had i made a video which is like which talks about uh 10 tips i have for like motivation when it comes to language learning at

that and that was one of those like be very careful of taking breaks because very often when you take a break you forget a lot of what you had recently learned so you feel like like when you you when you get back you have to do the same stuff over again and it feels like like you've lost so much time into the break and like getting back into it is so hard again and like when you when the ball is rolling when you have like, when you haven't skipped a single day and everything is going great, then it's like it's constant progress. But when you have suddenly taken a month break, you feel like you have to like, first of all, getting back into learning is like hard. Because the same way with exercise, let's say you go to the gym for a year and then suddenly don't go for two months it's way easier to not go to the gym than it is to go to the gym so you have to like

yeah you have to like yeah you have to restart the habit of learning or going to the gym so it's like it takes a lot of effort just to get the ball rolling again and then on top of that it's like you have to learn the same stuff you learned again i did have another topic i forgot it as you were talking um no but we are we are hitting just on two hours now so i guess we can uh we can wrap it up here. I'm getting really tired. I woke up this morning with a pounding headache and decided to take a nap.

I'm still tired. I'll rip. But I will go to bed early tonight and hopefully not be tired tomorrow, but I'm still going to be tired. I'm always tired. Yeah. I know that feeling as well. well problem of working night shifts oh okay i guess yeah i guess the issue with like uh that kind of

stuff is like um melatonin production like basically sunlight is actually really important for getting enough energy through the day like if if i in the morning if i have like um uh my uh curtains down and light gets into my room it's so much easier to wake up than during winter where it's like constantly dark here and like it's uh i have to wake up when it's like pitch black in my room and it's constantly dark here. I have to wake up when it's pitch black in my room. And it's like I feel so much more tired every time. And it's like the same when you're awake as well and your room is completely dark. You're much more tired than it is when it's bright, even though you might have better sleep.

So I feel like working night, night shifts probably has like a similar effect. Yeah. Most likely. Yeah. That seems to be the case. So I usually try to take like an hour before I go to sleep and like, you know, have a lamp on and just read for a while.

Yeah. Which would be nice, but when I get to the point where i can actually use that time and read something in japanese that'd be nice yeah i'm actually i'm actually waiting for that too like once i get past the uh main anki deck i have like i could start immersing right now intensively as well but i i don't know. I kind of feel like I want to finish the deck as it's like a milestone. And then I'm mentally prepared to start immersing a lot

and reading a lot and stuff like that, getting into the fun stuff. I might have a look into that deck and just see how it goes. It'd be nice to try out alongside uh alongside wani kani see see which i prefer yeah it's uh i recommend trying it it's not i suppose uh i said in a video that it's a must have for me but i suppose it doesn't like not everyone likes it it seems uh they don't like like how it's structured they prefer to have sentences for example for

context because the text doesn't have context like when you see a word often you have duplicates of the same word but they're not really duplicates it's just like the same kanji used for two different words and stuff like that so yeah it's like you have to deal with those things but i i don't mind them so much it's it's a bit frustrating at times but at the same time what isn't frustrating when it comes to doing something as hard as learning japanese so well i think that's oh yeah one more thing oh yes uh is that um i'm doing the 6K version, but there's a 2K version as well. 6K is basically just 2K plus 4K. So 2K, 6K.

A lot of people do the 2,000 words first, like the 2K, and then start immersing. And I assume that's a valid strategy as well. Like just get the core 2,000 words and then start focusing on immersion and 2000 words and then start like focusing on immersion and mining words and sentences from immersion and i think that can be a very uh practical way of doing it as well that makes sense yeah yeah because what it's not like you need 6000 words to be able to start actually immerse immerse immersing that's how

that's how english works wow yeah um yeah you definitely don't and like the deck has some words which are like um like genuinely words which you might not use like in everyday life like some business words and like politics and stuff like that but i don't mind them i feel like everything i learned has some like benefit at least like here is the kanji for communism like all right yeah actually there is communism communism is like kyo sanshugi or something like that okay sure yeah i don't think you're gonna use that one in like everyday conversation yeah i suppose unless you like want to talk about politics in japanese i'm good i don't want to do

that i just want to i just want to listen to don't know, cute girls doing cute things. Yeah. Probably a more wholesome experience than discussing... Or, you know, Jojo. Jojo also works. Yeah. Yeah, if we don't end it off now, we're not going to end it off at any point. Yeah, if we don't end it off now,

we're not going to end it off at any point. Usually what I do at the end of the podcast is give just a random channel a shout out. And I don't know how we didn't mention him throughout the entire two hours, but I'm just going to say, anyone who hasn't watched this channel before, go watch Matt vs. Japan. Yeah.

I don't know how in two hours his name didn't come up once that's actually impressive i actually include like a lot of his videos in my own videos as a reference like because it's like i don't mind giving like i feel like giving shout outs to people is a good thing in the sense that uh if they have put effort into their content and it's good content, then it deserves to be watched. And at the same time, I feel like it's nice that I don't have to explain the same thing he already has explained in very great detail. So I can just reference the video. So if you're more interested in learning more about that specific thing, you can just watch that video. learning more about that specific thing you can just watch that video so it's like really nice that he has made those videos because i can always refer to them myself as well yeah that's very true

do you have a uh another channel you might recommend um if you don't i'm i do have a couple others i can think of. I wish I did. I actually kind of don't right now. Maybe like Dogen, perhaps. I just searched up Dogen. Yeah, okay, that works. I love his channel. Yeah, he has educational and comedy content for Japanese as well.

Educational as in like um he has pitch accent uh stuff which is a very important topic for japanese as well it's probably good to get started with it early as well and i guess in general has a lot of comedy content and advanced japanese lessons in advanced as in culturally advanced. Well, even if you're not really interested in learning Japanese, he has a lot of really entertaining videos. Just watching comedy stuff is fun enough.

Yeah. I've been watching his stuff way before I even thought about learning Japanese. Yeah. Cool. Uh, okay. yeah cool okay where can people find you oh well I guess on YouTube

I have a Twitter account as well but I'm actually not that active on Twitter that's good you shouldn't be it's a waste of time yeah so I think my YouTube channel is just it's a waste of time yeah so i think my youtube channel is just uh it's uh the name is liva kiwi like liva kiwi l-i-v-a-k-i-v-i make sure you spell it correctly i've noticed it's

really difficult to find your account like if you have one letter wrong it just doesn't show up oh damn yeah it's a bit oh yeah i like i i have okay this is the last thing i suppose before we end it's fine if we keep going on it's all good yeah okay it's basically i have a lot of trouble like picking screen names for various places i i i like i can't force myself to think of a good name it has to come naturally and it has to stick naturally yeah so like uh i can kind of say that i kind of forced that name on my youtube channel and i'm still not sure if i if i like it or not but at least like but at least if you search it on google or on youtube there are like basically no other results except my channel so at least it's good for search engines i suppose

unless you misspell it then it doesn't work well i think the misspelling thing's partially just because the channel's so small and there's not that much content on it but over, that should change. Yeah. I hope so, too. But my name's... I'm just as bad with it. That's the reason why my channel is just Brody Robertson, because I'm horrible at naming things. Like, you know what? I'll just use my name, whatever.

Yeah, that's pretty legit, I suppose. And there's not that many Brodie Robertsons that make content. There is an 8-year-old Fortnite YouTuber. He has like 10 subs. There is a golf player. And there's like some random woman.

But I am the top result. Well, that's nice, I suppose. I wasn't the star. I suppose, hopefully... It was a mess of the sun i had the i had the problem we're like oh there's all of these other brody robbins that came before me but none of them really made videos it was just channels that existed yeah i guess you overtook the fortnite player now and well okay it was um so we can finally end it

it was a really nice talk I had a lot of fun as well yeah I haven't really done any podcasts before so maybe hopefully it's still fun to listen to for somebody who's listening

listening hopefully well Well, hopefully it's still fun to listen to for somebody who's listening. Oddly. Well, one of the... Actually, how many subs are there on Odyssey? On YouTube, there's like 400 subs on the channel. On Odyssey, there's I think like 14,000, something like that. They're one of the 14 000 people enjoy it um maybe i don't know oh yeah that would be i hope so like even if there's like one person who finds it entertaining it's always still nice like i do a lot of variety on the podcast so

i think the people who watch it sort of expect there to be different sort of people who come on yeah yeah and perhaps like there's so much stuff to talk about like the interesting thing is with language learning is that it's just it's surprisingly there's so much stuff to talk about so i suppose if we couldn't talk about everything today maybe some next time in the future as well for For sure, yeah. If you want to come back on at any point, I'm more than happy to have you back on. Yeah, sure.

All right. Cool. So before we go, I will read out my patrons. A special thank you to Chris, Joachim, Donald, Michael, Andrew, Nathan, David, Brennan, ChicoBender, Jamie, Joseph, Mitchell, Peter, Steve, and Tony,

and all of the ToodleLaws supporters. If you'd like to support my work, there'll be links in the description to all of that. The video version of this podcast is on YouTube and Odyssey if you're watching the audio version. For the video listeners, the video watchers,

the audio version you'll find literally anywhere on any podcast platform. Just look up tech over tea and it will probably be there and as for liver kivy's links they will be in the description uh also go join his discord it's very very

quiet right now and yeah maybe it'll be more fun as more people join yeah cool any uh any last words um Yeah. Maybe it'll be more fun as more people join. Yeah. Cool. Any last words? No, I suppose it was really fun and hopefully fun for everyone else as well.

Cool. Thank you guys for watching.