hamilton.likes.to.draw...

I have kept up a daily routine of practicing Japanese for the last 3 months. I am over a 120 streak on duolingo, and I'm quite proud of that.

I have put in some more work on my kana website. I am still trying to figure out the best layouts and design and tools for it. It has been a lot of back and forth and some of the most dreaded thing a developer can say. ... refactoring. *shudder*

But it is starting to get to a place that feels quite useful, not necessarily as a full on keyboard yet, but definitely as a learning tool. It helps me to visualize the possibilities of だくてん and はんだくてん and the like. I wonder how google will begin to recategorize my site for the mere fact that I these characters now show up in it.

This latest set of changes has caused an enormous refactor. I had been very specific in my classes and names, and I realized that in order for the tool to be better and more future forward, I needed the class names to be much more generic. Instead of saying a position was the hiragana position, it became the primary position. Instead of the cardinal position being called romaji katakana and keyboard, I just switched to calling them their cardinal names of northwest, northeast, southwest, southeast. Then this caused problems, because of course i shortened the classnames to two characters like ne and sw, but you se both ne and se are romaji transliterations of Japanese characters, and I was ALSO using those already in other parts of the code. Oh it was a big mess. But I think I finally have it moving in a much better direction.

For the last few months, I've been practicing my Japanese diligently. I have a goal to be able to travel to Japan and be able to communicate. I've always wanted to. I am now at the place where I can more or less recognize all of the Hiragana. This is a big thing for any learner of a new alphabet. I can read Japanese. I can't understand 90% of it, but I can read it. And that is so cool.

I am now learning the katakana, and God help me, I will soon have to learn the kanji. But that day still seems far off. I've begun trying to read conversationally, and it is... very difficult. Manga is way too far off for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm trying. I bought some of the manga I loved like Naruto, One Piece and Dragonball, but even trying to get three pages into any of these is an absolute struggle. Mainly because as soon as you learn the hiragana you feel incredibly accomplished, but as soon as you get into the real world of Japanese, katakana and kanji are EVERYWHERE. Katakana feels like at least 50% of what you'll read.

And this has been mildly disheartening, but also has bolstered my resolve to learn even harder.

I sat down to make myself a reference sheet for the kana, and I am now sharing it with you, dear reader. https://hdraws.com/kana. This is a work in progress, and currently it's mostly useless on mobile. But it is, at the writing of this blog post, only 2 days of work in javascript, react, and css. I did some big work in css grids. I'm learning a lot about keyboard layouts as well.

Anyways. Thats been the last few days for me.