a normal day

To be honest, I’ve had a lot of “normal” days in Tokyo so far - I’ve been reflecting on this a bit, and while it would be nice to have fun new adventures all the time, I don’t really think that’s necessary, and it’s kind of unrealistic. I actually have lots to talk about on the blog still, but since I want the blog to be a more accurate snapshot of my everyday life here (instead of a curated, “interesting and fun” social media version), I wanted to specifically callout that I don’t think I had many novel/notable experiences yesterday.

I’ve been helping Miles with Japanese studies most evenings, and I end up finding myself daydreaming during class about how I’d design my own Japanese-learning curriculum instead. Obviously, I have a lot to learn still, but I find that the thoughts when starting off are most valuable and also most easily lost as people become more advanced. The closest analogy I can think of is when I started my previous job, the onboard documentation was pretty bare-bones, and it was a really frustrating experience because I felt so useless starting off. The team wasn’t huge at the time, so the time and energy that would’ve needed to be put into onboarding documentation just wasn’t worth it for a one-time deal (after all, once you onboard, you never have to do it again through your tenure). But I think the experience of learning a new language should be accurately captured, especially at the beginning stages, because what if it could be better? And it seems like not everyone learns with the same methods, or some people have a more natural inclination towards it than others. Instead of catering towards the standard or natural learner, I think finding the most effective methods for people who are really bad at language learning could be really powerful.

Actually keeping today’s post short and sweet but one of these days I will crank out my posts from the past few weeks.