There is no one size fits all method of learning. Given someone's unique background, there is an equally unique way to design a learning strategy that works with their theory of mind and intuition about the world. As for me, I grew up in a bilingual environment where I spoke and learned Korean & English. Later in 6th grade when I started learning Japanese, I realized that neither the Korean textbook '민나노 日本語' or the curriculum for English speakers 'felt right' for me. For some context, while Japanese and Korean are in different language families, they have remarkably similar grammar structure to an almost 1-to-1 translational level. Due to the Chinese language influence, the lexicons are similar as well. Given these facts, it makes more sense for me to learn Japanese in Korean rather than English. However, while my grasp of Korean grammar and speaking is high, my reading skills and vocabulary comprehension are not as good as I haven't read many Korean books (yet). Due to this, when learning to read Japanese and new vocabulary, I would have an easier time memorizing through a mapping from English to Japanese. Eventually, during my self-learning journey, I developed a unique system for myself. For grammar, I would learn about them on the Korean internet (with a VPN). I found that this helped me understand grammatical concepts in a more intuitive way (since Korean and Japanese are very grammatically similar). For vocab drilling, however, I found it more effective to memorize using English. An example of this is since I normally think in English, I naturally come up with vocabulary much easier in English than in Korean. For vocab in context, I would listen to the Japanese version of K-pop songs from my childhood and compare the lyrics. I also re-watched shows like Doraemon and Crayon Shin-Chan, shows I used to watch on TV when I lived in Korea. Side Tangent: While learning Mandarin in high school, I had a fun realization that I can learn to understand the pure 'meaning' associated with an individual 汉子/漢字/한자/character, and translate things from 'meaning-to-language' when trying to read these characters in Chinese, Japanese, or older Korean scriptures.It's difficult to express how this truly feels using text, but I suppose words always come at a loss of information. Anyways, I created this project to mediate all of this language learning chaos.
React.js (TypeScript), Node.js, Netlify, MongoDB, DeepL API, GPT-4 API & Whisper API, Chakra