mine too, but none was such a dick. also, anything related to school (particularly at a young age), is not viewed as something to boast of (at least in my experience in italy, serbia and portugal).
My shorts are mostly of the creators I follow or adjecent creators. I do get the occasional AI slop, but it looks more like the algorithm is testing someone new, to learn what they are, than the algorithm feeding me slop.
Now Facebook/insta shorts, they are somehow just trash. But maybe that is because I don’t follow any creators on those platforms.
There’s another school of teaching, where kana and kanji are banned for the first 2-3 semesters because they are a distraction to learn and internalize words and grammar.
I’ve met a few students of this textbook system when I was on exchange and my impression was that they were very skilled at Japanese for the amount of time they’ve been a student and what they told about their seniors was they pick up kanji fast, since they already know the words.
The big problem of course is that it is completely incompatible with other schools. Where do you place them when they go on exchange? With the n3 or n5 students?
Anyway, I always thought it was interesting that the exact antithesis of RTK* exists and works.
*RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.
> *RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.
One thing I have found over the years, I have never met a foreigner living in Japan who has used it extensively. (Many were aware of it, but few used it heavily.) However, there is a lively community of online learners who use it. (Don't read that as a judgement against using it; this is simply an observation.)
I was surprised to read this part:
> a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word
I have never heard this description before. I always thought it was a learning aid to use mnemonics to remember the meaning of individual kanji. If someone can complete all volumes of RTK before "learn[ing] their first word", I would be stunned. It would be a feat of super-human level of memorization and recall. That said, the Internet is a huge place with billions of people. There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.
"all" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the philosophy is to learn to recognize roughly 2000 kanji before starting the actual language learning. Volume 2 and 3 are supposed to complement more normal language learning.
The theory is based on the authors experience seeing Chinese and Korean students learn much, much faster than their western peers in Japanese language classes, coupled with an argument for "If you can read 50% of characters, you still can't read"
I'm surprised you've never come across this, as it is in the foreword.
> There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.
I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)
Good for him. He was a strong student, but I wouldn't recommend it.
> I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)
While I certainly believe your story, I hope that you know he is an extreme outlier with super-human level of memorization and recall. Tiny question: Do you know if his uni with in the countryside or a big city? The people whom I have met that gained fluency the fastest (normies here, no superhumans, please!) all had significant time lived in the countryside, so they had an immersive language learning experience.
Thank you to confirm. He probably had the "perfect storm" of countryside language immersion with excellent recall. (I am jealous!) It is always bloody impressive to me to see someone achieve near native-level understanding of Japanese coming from a completely different linguistic culture.
I have always felt furigana bridges that gap well enough in written learning. The downside is that it might become a crutch, but it can't for long if you are serious about learning reading. Native materials pretty quickly drop furigana.
Like with a lot of things like this, if you learn for long enough the differences in the major approaches work themselves out.
About 25 years ago, I studied Hebrew. It is a fascinating language to me (as is Arabic). One of the features, weirdly similar to furigana, is the "dots" placed above vowels to indicates how to pronouce words. (Sorry, I don't know the technical linguistic term to describe these dots.) In regular texts, these dots are excluded, and readers are expected to (essentially) have the dots memorized. I always struggled to read Hebrew text without the dots.
In the last 10 years in Japan, more and more goverment documents are now available with furigana. Sometimes the edition is called "Friendly Japanese" (yasashii nihongo / やさしい日本語). The best explaination I can think of: There has been a dramatic rise in the number of non-university-educated foreign workers who have come to Japan on labor contracts -- factory workers, farm workers, hotel staff, shop staff, etc. They need to live their daily lives in Japan, but will struggle with native-level Japanese documents, so the gov't (both national and local) make an effort to reduce this friction. I expect the level of support from local gov'ts will be very much correlated to the number of foreign workers in their districts.
There’s another school of teaching, which bans all reading, writing, and speaking altogether in favor of exclusively native speaker verbal input for the first 6-12+ months of learning. Some YouTubers seem to like the idea of this, though sounds pretty extreme.
I agree that most of their money comes from Google (at least for now).
But when you load their home page (https://www.mozillafoundation.org), the first thing you are greeted with is a banner that says they have raised over $6M in their last campaign alone.
So, it seems that millions are being donated by users.
The claim that most of those users want it to go to their browser is not supported or refuted by that page, but I have read a detailed breakdown of all their donations and attempts to guess what people really think they are donating for, and it matched my original statement - though I haven't got the time to search now, what do _you_ think people are donating for?
I don't think they were thinking of "no government", rather something like "government working in support of capital" (see 2008 financial crisis bank bail-outs; enforcing private ownership and protecting accumulated wealth).
How little imagination we have anymore! Its like you discover ice cream but for some reason only chocolate ice cream. Someone is like "chocolate is no good" and all you know to think is: "Oh so you guys just dont want ice cream at all?!"
Governments are fine. Any group of people large enough to not be a hivemind on everything has a government. Even if they don't formalize it, it will still emerge organically as they run into issues that require consensus on actions.
The crucial difference is between the governments actually run by the people, and the governments that claim to "represent" them.
I’d like to have deck-wide variables/lookup tables and links.
The decks for studying Japanese that I’d like would have RTK/wanikani style elements used for mnemonics and I’d like them shown in the answer along with a full description and cross references.
Right now I’d have to build a templating system to prebuilt my deck and import it and it’s just a lot of work on top of the work of building the content, but mostly it makes it difficult to edit/update cards while studying.
> First of all, the promise of easy portability breaks as soon as the script has dependencies.
And bash has a good dependency story? At least with python you can bundle your script with a requirements.txt file and it is doable for the target machine to get up and running.
How does this compare to similar schemes in other countries? I believe Portugal is a popular destination for acquiring EU Passport. The UAE also has a golden visa, but it is not a path to citizenship or a passport.
In the EU 'golden visa' schemes are typically about investing a particular amount in the economy of the country. Exact amounts vary, but it's usually along the lines of x00,000 euro in property in the country (mortgage free value) or x00,000 euro in government bonds or x00,000 euro in a business within the country
Usually this gets you residency for some years conditional on the investment staying within the country, and potentially a path to citizenship after some years of living in the country.
The 15K application fee for background checks seems like a good idea. The Turkish program for citizenship by investment attracted many global crime syndicate members because apparently there were no proper background checks and you are allowed to pick a new name when you acquire the Turkish citizenship. Suddenly world class drug or illegal gambling kingpins turned into a businessmen from Turkey, over the years there were many many high profile scandals, murders etc and apparently they integrated their business into their new country too. Some speculate that has happened knowingly because at the same time the Turkish government reduced the money flow check and even started a program where you can just launder your money by paying some small tax. They din’t ask you questions where that money came from if you pay the tax. So you can get your drug cartel money into the bank banking system.
These days they are trying to clean up the mess they created a few years but it did help to keep the economy afloat when they were doing economically ridiculous but ideologically and politically motivated things.
Malta is especially famous for that in the EU by essentially selling EU citizenship. But the EU has recently pushed back through the ECJ, which ruled the scheme illegal.
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