September 13. I did not seriously study Japanese today; all my energy went into building the Dark Wings website.
Although I had AI agents to help, there were times when I could no longer tell whether AI was working for me or I was working for AI. This was especially true with website building, a field I knew absolutely nothing about. Handing the whole thing over to agents for automation burned through tokens: after only a few tasks, I had already hit the limit and had to wait for my usage to reset—or top up and keep burning actual money.
While waiting for the website to be built and arranged, I found time to look up Japan’s voltage and plug types, and to have a preliminary conversation with the agency about choosing a language school.
The agency’s view was that language schools recruiting students in Taiwan were unlikely to be too terrible. Besides, the teachers and classmates you encountered varied from class to class; sometimes it came down to luck.
From my own experience at a language school, it was certainly possible to end up with a teacher who was not very good at teaching. More often, however, the atmosphere of the class was the greatest obstacle—or the greatest support—along the road to learning.
In fact, while choosing a language school this time, I conducted a rather bold experiment. I asked three different AI programs to search for schools in designated areas, compile lists, and look up tuition and accommodation. I then had the three systems cross-check the schools the others had missed and verify whether the fees and information were accurate.
I even had AI search for and organise the reviews.
Broadly speaking, AI really could collect and organise those lists quickly. But I had overlooked one fatal problem:
A school whose reviews, teaching quality and courses all looked good would not necessarily still have a place one month before term began.
That mistaken assumption was precisely why I decided, in a very short span of time, to use an agency. Perhaps an agency could find out which schools still had places more quickly than I could by asking AI to fire off a batch of inquiry emails.
To be honest, when you decide on the spur of the moment to go to school only a month before term starts, any school that still has places is unlikely to be one of the famous, wildly popular ones. So I shall leave it to fate, and leave it to heaven.
When I was younger, I did not particularly enjoy Japanese novels. I had read Haruki Murakami, but I never managed to enter his prose.
Books translated from Japanese also differed radically in style and technique from works by Western or Chinese-language writers. There was something very strange about the way Japanese writers arranged words and allowed meaning to gather around them. At times the prose was as plain as drinking boiled water, as though it were putting the vernacular-literature movement championed during May Fourth into practice at the highest possible standard.
Today, however, Readmoo was running a promotion on out-of-print e-books, and I bought a collection of short stories by Mori Ōgai.
Perhaps, now that I am middle-aged, reading Japanese writers again will bring a different kind of understanding.
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