So sorry to hear it. Not much meaningful support I can give, but know that people care and want to see you succeed.

Take care of your health first. If studies help take your mind off things or put you into a good place mentally, then great. But if you need to take time and process some stuff, breaks are OK too.

For what it’s worth, I see this image fine from Lemmy/Voyager.

Lemmy does allow images. Just seems like they’re attached some kind of different way. Now that I’m on desktop I can open that link on its own instance. And it’s actually a little aggravating, the pictures are shown enlarged by default, with no way (I can find) to collapse them? But that’s probably just the default UI or config for that instance.

I probably might open a Piefed account someday. One of those things I’d like to get around to, that I’m not in any hurry for.

The pictures don’t show expanded unless I click to make them full screen. Your first two screenshots aren’t loading, but from the third I see flair tags on the post which is pretty cool, those don’t show on Lemmy.

Haven’t tried the Learn Through Haiku, so I can’t comment on that one.

How beginner are we going? I like the graded readers from Ask. At first I thought it wouldn’t be worth getting printed ones, but they’re pretty nice quality. And around level 3 (as far as I’ve tried) you get substantial little short stories in there - around 30 pages per book, and they come in bundles of 5.

I’ve tried some of the Japanese Language Park’s ‘Short Stories for Japanese Learners’ stuff, and actually it’s pretty good too. They have vocabulary lists, q&a, and a full English translation after each story. Personally, I’d rather just have the vocab list and not use so many pages for the other stuff, but it’s preference. I also have a “Japanese Short Stories for Beginners” from Lingo Mastery, which I’m not a big fan of. Typsetting and editing seem sloppy, but it does the job of providing short stories.

More advanced, the Tsubasa Bunko stuff seems like a good route. I picked up a Tsubasa Bunko copy of 時をかける少女 (Girl Who Leapt Through Time) and it seems really nice. Full furigana, a picture every handful of pages. But it’s a lot, reading an actual novel (even youth-targeted) for me, for now, just involves too many word lookups.

For broader options, try browing Natively maybe.

I know there are cool ux improvements and more thought out design in Piefed, but I’m not too sure of the particulars. Mainly I’m aware of it having a way to kinda ‘group up’ related communities and reduce duplication.

I definitely don’t have a hang of it. From Lemmy/Voyager, that link looks like any other community. What should I be noticing?

I didn’t make it, just filling in since past mods have stepped away for now. Agree Piefed is good, but not sure it’d be worth migrating anything.

Yep, I think that’s good. Don’t overdo it with general content just because it’s in another language. But feel free to start/practice discussion in whatever language or talk about languages/learning in any lang.

Relatable. I feel like I’m in the opposite situation, where the ones I enjoy listening to more are usually by women, but I should probably be listening to guys more to emulate. I think the higher pitched voices just seem more detectable to me, for now. Once I’m further along I’m hoping listening to Yuyu and eventually ゆる言語学 will be more fun.

It’s just really hard! It may not feel like any traction toward the massive goal of ‘being fluent’ or whatever, but you know more than you did.

Between stopping and starting and trying different resources, I’m always encouraged when I encounter a word or character in a different context. Gives me that little glimpse of what I call ‘the language folding in on itself’, and seeming connected and tractable.

Good call! Savor it.

Looking forward to the post-mortem. ;)

Akane is really good! Her unscripted podcasts are still mostly over my head, but the short, scripted ones are approachable. Of all the podcasts I’ve tried, something about that one feels like the best balance of clear, well-spoken, balanced audio with a pace that’s not too fast or conspicuously slow.

TIL Nintendo is still selling Hanafuda cards in Japan.

It’s fun to see which games get cool borders or color palettes!

I have not noticed the faster frame rates. But I’m one of those weirdos who couldn’t tell you 30 from 60 unless I’m staring hard at a side by side or something. So take me with a grain of salt, lol.

Really it’s up to your preference. I like the Super Game Boy for plain GB games and GB Player for Color/Advance. But the cost on the latter is annoying, so if it were me I’d start with the SGB and enjoy that for a while since you already have SNES hardware.

Have a good visit! Are you staying long?

Nice consistency!

I found sinking more time into Japanese seemed to be more rewarding than just sinking into Spanish.

I’m with you there for sure. To me I think a lot of it is falling into the intermediate slump for ES, where really progressing starts to take a lot more. But also Japanese just has a lot of very different aspects that benefit a lot from memorization and study.

Not sure what else would be a reading goal for now

Those sound like good goals! Going back to any favorite books is a good call.

I’d like to eventually be able to read complex, native adult-targeted literature in original language. Stuff like your Murakamis and Muratas I guess. But for now I’m only at graded readers for JP and young adult level stuff for ES. I’ll try to keep it kinda fluid and follow what’s interesting as it catches me.

Project M and Brawl Minus were a ton of fun!

They’re Smash Brawl fan mods where the game gets totally reworked. The former makes it like Melee, while the latter makes everything ridiculous.

There are others too that I haven’t spent the time with. Melee itself has a mod with a few new chars, and Smash 64 has an extensive remix.