Vivia 🦆🍵🦀

  • 21 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Well, maybe you are:

    • Planning a surprise party
    • Leaving a job
    • Trying to escape an abusive relationship
    • Famous
    • Writing a detective novel
    • A writer without a publisher
    • Searching about an embarrassing medical condition
    • Having a crush in someone
    • In the closet
    • A teenager with controlling parents
    • Having a hobby that’s considered embarrassing or childish
    • Having a psycho stalker
    • Buying a present from Santa
    • A reporter who doesn’t want to reveal their sources
    • Buying a toilet and you don’t want toilet recommendations for the rest of your life
    • Lending your computer to someone, and you don’t want your recommended videos to change
    • Under an NDA

    … Or maybe you’re talking with someone who’s in one of those categories.

    We have to normalise privacy in order to keep these people safe. For instance, it’s a stupid example but it works, if I always use private browser windows, my husband won’t suspect anything when I’m looking for a gift for him.

    That’s only the tip of the iceberg and it’s not even touching some bigger problems:

    • You can be profiled based on your likes, social media posts, purchase history, etc, and maybe used for election results manipulation, or who knows what else. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it has happened, see for instance Cambridge Analytica.
    • Maybe the political situation will change in the future. Oops, now your data is suddenly in the hands of a malicious dictator.
    • If you keep a backdoor open to let the “good and trusted” actors in, there’s no way to not let malicious actors in as well.









  • You can immerse yourself into stuff like online articles, blog posts, or Twitter (yes I know, Japanese people don’t seem willing to leave it). This way you can read at your own pace without having to chase after what you hear. You can install a browser add-on like Yomichan for Firefox, that lets you look up words by just hovering over them while pressing Shift. It makes reading 100x easier.

    There are also some websites that offer articles for each reading level, such as https://yomujp.com/n5/ and https://www.nihongoschool.co.uk/nihongoblog .

    Finally, what I can really recommend is to find some Japanese friends to chat with. Difficult, I know. Back in my day I searched on Skype, I wouldn’t know what to recommend now, sorry. I first did this when I was around N5 level and totally fell flat on my face, but when I was at N4 I could easily hold a conversation about a variety of topics.










  • Not a native speaker, but nobody else has jumped in, so here’s my understanding of it. Take it with a grain of salt because I’m not a native speaker. If you want I could ask my sensei for clarifications, I just would prefer to not bother her.

    These two phrases only have a different nuance, not technically a different meaning. The nuance is exactly what you described in what you consciously know. So you might use the 〜ていた form to say how it was safe for you to go on a hike, and the 〜た form to focus on the season change itself. It’s not necessarily wrong to use them interchangeably.