I am learning Japanese in order to read books in Japanese, especially mystery novels 🙂 I am also learning Korean and a little bit of Chinese with the same goal.

I am not pursuing any social or business goal with Japanese, so I have decided to focus entirely on what I was enjoying the most and stop worrying about not being able to speak well.

Focusing on improving my reading level only allowed me to progress more quickly, and I am now able to enjoy most mystery novels without looking up words, though literary fiction is still challenging.

I used to draw my own illustrations for this blog, but I am not an artist, and every drawing took me a considerable amount of time. So I have decided to use DALL-E instead, in order to save time and post more regularly. Until September 2022, all illustrations are by me, but DALL-E created all the illustrations from October 2022 on, including this “cat sleeping on a pile of book”,