i'm back

After a month-and-a-half-long haitus, I’ve finally returned! While admittedly I wasn’t occupied every single second of every day from the end of February till now, it felt like there was a constant stream of things to do and I was struggling to pick up writing and publishing again. I have so much I want to share, from some of the more significant activities we’ve been up to the past few weeks, to more small nuggets/slice-of-life-esque things that I desperately want to capture, but I’m still figuring out how to best convey less tangible things like subtle feelings of simple joys or small frustrations via this blog. It’ll take me a while to go through the backlog of experiences, but for now, I’ll just give an overview of what I’ve been up to over the past month-and-a-half.

• - I last talked about the apartment hunt and packing up our apartment to go. We officially moved on February 20th, and I do have a very long post in the works about that entire experience.
• - Immediately after our move, I took Miles back to Hakuba to do a ski trip over a long weekend (which happened to coincide with my birthday. Fun fact, the holiday is actually the emperor’s birthday, which means I have the same birthday as the emperor of Japan! Okay not actually, we’re one day off, but the holiday was celebrated on my birthday, so close enough.)
• - Had a few friends from the US visit Tokyo the following week, hung out a bunch, had a housewarming + birthday party (there’s a pretty good story there so I’ll have to make a post about that)
• - Got a little sick after that. Watched my friend Angela run the Tokyo marathon on March 2nd
• - Dealing with new apartment/move stuff and being sick the following week
• - Flew to Sapporo for the weekend of 3/8-3/9 to meet up with more friends
• - Two of the friends who were in Sapporo came back to Tokyo with us and stayed in our now slightly more-furnished apartment from 3/9-3/13, ate a bunch of meals at the Google office hehe. I desperately needed to ramp up my Japanese studying because the end-of-semester final exams were coming up.
• - We took a very short trip back to the US to attend a wedding in Phoenix and stopped by SF from 3/13-3/18. My final exams were broken up over 3 days, so I literally had an exam on 3/13, then flew out that night, and then had another exam on 3/19 only 12 hours after getting back.
• - Miles’s mom actually joined us on our way back, and stayed with us from 3/18-3/31. We showed her around Tokyo a bunch, then once classes ended (and we got a few big appliances delivered morning of 3/25 - more on this later too), we headed out of Tokyo for a little trip.
• - We were in Hiroshima + Miyajima for 3/25-3/27, then Kinosaki Onsen from 3/27-3/29 (and had a quick stop in Kyoto on the 29th as well). This was a pretty top-tier vacation so I really want to make a dedicated post about it!
• - Multiple friends from all different parts of my life, from middle school and college friends, to friends from previous jobs, to housemate friends, to family/cousins (and Miles’s friends/family too) have honestly been popping in far more frequently than I was expecting. It’s really awesome seeing so many people visit and even reconnecting with old friends on the other side of the world. I think this deserves some more reflection but I just wanted to mention this here so I remember to talk about it later.
• - It’s sakura (cherry-blossom) season and Miles and I did check out the sakura in Ueno Park, but the weather has also been pretty awful. I’m so glad we live in Japan, because people literally plan trips to Japan this time of year to see the sakura, so places are extremely crowded and if you don’t time your visit perfectly, you can very easily miss the magical ephemeral moment of seeing all the sakura bloom. I miiight make a dedicated post about this, we’ll see.

That more-or-less brings us to today - I’ve been really enjoying just taking it easy and have no major plans for this week other than properly getting settled into our apartment for real and getting ready for the new school semester. The new semester starts next Monday, April 7th, so I’ve got quite a bit of time to bum around honestly.

I signed up to take the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) in July. It’s the standardized test to, well, you guessed it - measure your Japanese proficiency, and is used from job applications to even applying for permanent residency. The levels go from N5 (easiest) to N1 (most difficult), and N3 is usually the minimum required by high-skilled jobs, but most jobs require at least N2. The ironic thing is that people I know who have or are actively studying for N1 have said they feel far from being fluent in the language - the exams only include reading and listening (and are purely multiple-choice), writing and speaking are not part of the exam. So is it a good measure of language proficiency? maybe not… but since it is the only official measure of proficiency, it’s at least something to work towards.

They offer the test twice a year, July and December, and you have to indicate what level you want to test at. I think I could pass N5 now, so I had to decide whether to go for the N4 or N3 test in July, and being a bit of a try-hard, I ended up signing up for N3. I have no idea if I’ll get good enough in 3 months to get to N3, but there’s only one way to find out, I guess. I suspect it’ll be pretty difficult, so I’m also mentally preparing myself for an increased study load this semester relative to the last one, especially because last semester I was also already familiar with a big chunk of the material, which I know is no longer going to be true moving forward. I believe the general guidance is it takes about 2 years of intensive study to get to N1, but the tests do get exponentially harder.

I’ve alluded to this before, but I’ve been really desiring better study tools, and I was feeling this especially as I was going into final exam week, trying to cram thousands of vocabulary and hundreds of grammar points into my brain with minimal success. So when I said I was mentally preparing myself for the upcoming semester, what I really meant was, I’ve actually been working on an app that is more custom-tailored towards my Japanese learning experience than a generic flashcard app, but more general than Japanese/language-learning apps (like Duolingo) which come bundled with their own set curriculum with a set pace and different vocabulary than my curriculum. Especially with the gloomy weather this week, I think it’s the perfect time to do a week-long (very chill) hackathon to try to crank the app out before the next semester starts.

Thank you all for continuing to read the blog and for reaching out to me about status updates <3 I’ll be sure to do a habits post follow-up at some point too (spoiler, the blog wasn’t the only thing I failed to keep up 😅)