If I was a vampire I would spend decades in different countries learning all the languages of the world and live hundreds of lives. But alas, I am a mortal... So I will make do with the time I have.
I started learning Japanese on my own in May of 2015, and now I have N2, unofficial N1-level Japanese. I work fully remote for a Japanese company as 正社員 and live in Sendai, Japan 🌳🏠🌳 My dream is to be like those geoguesser guys that can tell where any picture is from but with languages
About me
・My name is Skylar (fun fact, this name apparently comes from a Dutch surname which means "scholar," or "student" lol so you could say my interest in learning is ✨ destino ✨)
・I'm 30 years old
・My pronouns are they/she
・I'm 🩷💜💙 biace 🖤🤍🩶💜
・I'm an INTJ
・I've been on Tumblr since 2011, and on the internet in general since '08
・I got a bachelor's degree in International Studies with a regional focus on Asia and a minor in English in 2020
・My L1 is English ("Standard American English"/North-Central American English) and my L2 is Japanese (Kansai varient). I previously studied a tiny bit of Armenian and Romanian. I'm currently studying Finnish and want to study Croatian next!
・I'm neurodivergent, formerly diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, and probably have some kind of undiagnosed anxiety disorder
・Outside of academics, I like anime/manga (JJBA, Blue Lock), video games (RGG), I play soprano sax 🎷, I take care of my two degu babies 🐀, and I like Eurovision 💚🖤💙🤍
What will be on this blog
# Things that motivate/inspire me!
# Japanese language stuff
# General language and culture anything and everything
# Life advice
What you will not find on this blog is ❌AI slop❌ Unless the post is pointing out/criticising AI usage, I will never share AI content. If I do, it is unknowingly. In which case, PLEASE tell me and I will delete it and block the OP.
shoutout to slow growers, late bloomers, people whose plans got derailed by circumstances beyond their control or their own choices, people who never had a plan to begin with, people who have had to start over when theyre too old to feel like theyre supposed to be where they are, people who cant pretend theyre built for the environment theyre in, and everyone who's not living the life they thought they would. im proud of you for making it this far and i hope you keep going until youre happy ♡
(Use note: This is not exactly a "nice" word to use, and it's mostly used by guys, but it is an interesting slang word so I thought I'd add it. What should I use, you ask? 一緒にトイレに行く or いっしょにトイレにいく )
A Soviet spherical radome, 18m diameter, built in the early 1970s by the USSR PVO Air Defence Forces. Housed a PRV-13 Odd Pair height-finding radar, tracking aircraft up to 310 km range. Abandoned since 1991, now slowly collapsing.
For everyone who ‘used to love reading’ but now hasn’t finished a book in years, you CAN get it back. Genuinely start bringing a book (preferably short and either fiction or a non fiction topic you already really enjoy) everywhere you go and when you have 5-20 mins waiting for the bus or at the doctors office or mechanic or whatever, get out your book and read it! You don’t have to finish it quickly or even read it often but it is so good for your brain and fun to get into the habit of reading more (and replacing being on your phone for those moments). Source: I read 0 books in 2023 and I’ve read 12 in the first 4 months of 2026
To my 25 - 35 year olds, you've reached the age where people around you are starting to give up on themselves because they think it's too late. Don't let that energy rub off on you. It's not too late.
reminds me of the time i had to ask my coworker for the difference between 〜製 and 〜産!
日本製(にほんせい) = made/manufactured in japan
和歌山産(わかやまさん) = produced/grown in wakayama
make sense? generally, 〜製 is used for objects and 〜産 is used for produce! that's probably why the example sentence for 生産 (tokidokitokyoさん's vocab item) references a crop rather than something manmade.
of note: 95% of libya is desert, and giraffes are not found there! but this predates not just the libyan desert, but the entire sahara desert it's a part of! giraffes aren't found there any more and this is a memory of a time when things were giraffier
also apparently this rock art dates across multiple periods spanning thousands of years? but i couldn't find much detail on that so i can't give specifics
but yeah, this isn't just a memory of giraffes, but of giraffes now absent encountered by people just 2000 years (the difference between the late roman republic and today) out of the ice age, in a climate unfamiliar to any of the hundred billion people born since the desertification of the sahara drove the ancient egyptians to the nile, near the start of the agricultural revolution
the time between this and the birth of the sahara was nearly as long as the time between the birth of the sahara and now, in which all recorded history is contained, and all languages we can recognise at all - the language and culture of these people would be totally alien to current libyans, twice the difference between the oldest european language and english, predating all but libya's mountains!
and we have pictures of giraffes of the time! what a beautiful gift from such a distant past
OH how SATISFYING to see a word like 外交 in a sentence, think "hmmm ive never seen this word before but it must be pronounced がいこう and mean diplomacy right?" and be CORRECT
and the more you know the language the more often this happens!!!!!!!
oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the mayans and cleopatra lived in a time nearer to pizza hut’s invention than to the pyramids being built
I need a noncomprehensive history book that covers Known World History in time periods, like “in this century, all this shit was happening concurrently” and not just all spread out so I have to piece it together like some unpaid uneducated scholar
I grew up with this book, which is frickin’ enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.
Or if you want something you can put on your wall, there’s this: