Early this morning, an invoice for my language-school fees arrived from the agency. It made the next step feel suddenly tangible: once I pay it, Japan will draw a little closer.
Taken as a whole, today was a day in which disappointments kept accumulating. Hope does not always live far away; yet if I make one small attempt to change something each day, will I one day catch sight of it?
Building the Dark Wings Universe website is another new experiment for me. I have OpenAI and Claude take charge of different functions, leaving Agent progress notes for one another as they work their way through the deployment together.
It has also made me realise that building a website yourself still costs a fair amount if you want to produce, quickly, something that offers the basic functions you have in mind. As your requirements multiply, the price of development can rise far beyond what most people imagine. The alternative is to wait, slowly, for the Token allowance to reset and let the entire timetable stretch out.
After all, when every last task is handed to an Agent, Tokens burn at an alarming rate.
On the other hand, developing the site myself has certainly removed much of the back-and-forth I once would have had with web developers and designers. AI’s development skills have also reached roughly the level of a “mid-tier” designer.
In other words, we have entered an age in which, unless a person is truly “outstanding”, the space in which the human middle tier makes its living will be drastically squeezed.
That cannot help but make me wonder: what direction should education take in the future?
By coincidence, today I also watched an interview about the crisis in German education. One of the German guests blamed the country’s steep decline in PISA scores on the refugee crisis of the past decade, the blow dealt by the pandemic, parents who let children drift without pressing them to study, and schools that had made students too comfortable, allowing them to fall behind for want of challenge.
Another guest pointed to China, arguing that Chinese students rank among the strongest on measures of educational achievement because parents push them and the state treats education as a priority, among other reasons.
In fact, the educational scenes described in the interview are entirely familiar within East Asian systems and ways of thinking. Traditional Confucian thought has indeed raised “education” to an exceptionally high place.
But that is precisely where things become interesting.
I remember that, at least ten years ago, German television was rather fond of programmes about Asian students living under intense academic pressure. Those programmes invariably liked to mention that students in Asian countries had higher rates of suicide linked to the burden of schoolwork.
Everything has its price.
I can readily understand why German pundits and commentators are anxious about their country’s prospects. Yet this eagerness to look only at the surface and immediately borrow another country’s answer is certain to produce even greater failures in the future.
Which brings me back to the fact that next month, I will begin studying at a language school.
Online opinions are everywhere and agree on almost nothing. Does attending a language school actually help? Is it better to go to Japan while you are still a beginner, or to fight your way to an intermediate or advanced level first and only then go to Japan for further immersion—making the experience more efficient and less expensive?
Taiwanese learners of Japanese have the obvious advantage of knowing Chinese characters. Japanese grammar, however, could hardly be further removed from Chinese. And because of geography and history, the Japanese-language resources available in Taiwan are plainly richer than those one can reach in Germany.
The internet can close much of that gap, but I still think the texture of everyday life remains worlds apart.
Looking back on my own experience of learning German in Taiwan, I found myself thinking that it was better to save enough money and study in Germany itself. After a year, what I had gained there was far richer than what a year of study in Taiwan could have given me. Learning German in Taiwan meant paying with time instead of money; learning it in Germany meant paying with money instead of time.
In my experience, three months of study is not long enough to feel like a great leap. You still stumble over your words and find that only a handful of sentences will truly come. Starting from the very beginning, it takes at least six months merely to reach the point where speaking becomes a little possible.
The Japan I imagine is deeply conservative. I therefore expect both its classrooms and its methods of language teaching to remain fairly traditional.
I am writing that expectation down now, so that I can test it against reality later.
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