Hell yeahh double language update lets go! First before I get into everything, Ramadan Kareem everybody! I'm so happy I got to see another Ramadan and I might make a seperate blogpost for that.

Anyways, I'm first going to talk about my Somali progress, then my Japanese progress, (and then a secret third thing) since I haven't introduced this site properly to my Somali journey yet. If you don't already know, I'm from Somaliland yet I can't speak Somali! I know, how tragic... Because my parents decided to... not speak Somali to me as a baby, I didn't learn it. Somehow they're surprised by that... I don't even know myself. I'm kind of glad though, because the sad truth is that English just has more pratical use than Somali, which is only spoken by two countries, (three if you count Somaliland as a country, but I don't want to get political on my Anime nerd site.)

Because I never learnt Somali, I became a disappointment and a laughing stock of my family, friends, literaly every Somali person I knew, even my bus driver! And it sucks. People write me off as stupid or dumb or unfortunate all because I couldn't speak Somali, even though I didn't have much control over that. It's annoying, why do people think they're better than me over something they were "born" with? It's more common then you think. But I'm tired of being shamed and ridiculed, which is why I want to learn Somali.

But that isn't the only reason, the more important reason I have for learning Somali is that, I want to speak to the majority of my family who can only speak Somali. Because I'm Somali, I have like a billion cousins, aunts, uncles, etc, and most of them can't speak English, which means I can't talk to them. The person I especially want to speak to is my Grandmother on my mother's side. I see my cousins talk to her and laugh with her and I get upset because I can't talk with her like they can. And she's getting old and I'm so afraid she'll die without her ever knowing me, or me knowing her. I just, really really want to know my grandmother before she passes and learning Somali is the only way for me. I can deal with people making fun of me, who cares? But this reasons, breaks my heart and I'm even tearing up writing this. I just hope I can learn before it's too late.

Yeah, that was a bit morbid... You may be wondering how I've been learning Somali. Well firstly, back before I knew how to learn a language, I assumed that if I were to travel to Somaliland, I'd magically pick up the language by... idk breathing the Somali air?? Currently, I have lived in Somaliland for 4 years and... I don't know anything. You (and the rest of my family) may be wondering how the hell that's possible, shouldn't I be immersing 24/7? Well that's the problem, I'm not. I haven't done much with my life these couple years. I stay inside all day and talk to no one, which means I barely hear any Somali all day. The only Somali I know his how to survive the checkout when I'm buying snacks and if they say anything other than how much it costs I'm screwed.

So, how am I learning Somali now? Since nothing was happenning with my previous "method". Well now, I'm doing the same thing I'm doing with Japanaese, immersion + Anki! For the immmersion part, I've been watching this Somali series called "Xujo". What's it about? I don't know LOL my Somali isn't good enough yet. But it's pretty funny from what I can tell. I've also been reading Somali blogposts and reading some Somali history too. I read a little about Caraweelo and her story is just... crazy! Like slayy girl kill those men! But seriously though, what she did was very messed up but it's kind of cathartic reading about men being oppresssed for once. I also watch some podcasts but they're kinda boring, I only watch them whe I'm busy with drawing or something.

For Anki, I actually foud a pretty decent deck for Somali. I think it's meant for business purposes because there are lots of words relating to business-y things but, overall it's pretty good for my Somali. Also while I immerse I make cards for words I hear and see, AKA mining. It's kind of hard to find a definition, since I haven't any good English to Somali dictionaries and Google Translate can only go so far with Somali, but I still try my best. There are very few resources for this language and I'm scraping everything, I've even had to read Wikipedia and military documents just to learn some basic grammar. In a way, that makes Japanese easier to learn because there's so much content for learning and immersing compared to Somali lol.

Finally, to the update part! I've learnt about 30-40 words in this week and wow! It's surprisingly making a big difference. If you haven't heard of the 80/20 rule, it's basically that 20% of what you learn is 80% of what you use and 80% what you learn is 20% of what you use. Because I'm for the first time learning these common words, my understanding has shot up exponentially. I can understand my quran teacher better, I can catch a conversation my mom and grandma are having, I can even respond... kinda. Grammar is still a mystery to me. But that's okay! Inshallah, I'll get to it eventually and even become fluent!

Whew, that was a long blogpost, and I haven't yet talked about my Japanese! Don't worry, I have a reason as to why I've combined the two for today, more on that below. Anyways, how's my Japanese since last time? Well, it's only getting better! I know a decent amount of N4 vocab and I'm almost done with N5 vocab completely. I'm just doing things at the pace of Core 2k/6k which is my main Anki deck, which I have a 7 day streak on! Woohoo! (Although learning a language while fasting is so hard... I have so much brainfog but I try my best!) I also do Jlabs beginner course, even though it's personally a bit below my level. It's still useful for basic grammar that I somehow haven't learnt yet?? Like wdym I'm just now learning about な adjectives and い adjectives? Nani?! Oh well, better late than never...

But enough about Anki and JLPT, what about understanding content? Well let me tell you, it's going GREAT!! I recently listened to Hatsune Miku's high pitch test song cus it got reccommended to me or something and... oh my god I understood pretty much the whole thing. Like 80%, and I was able to learn the rest since it was pretty much filled with I+1 sentences. You guys don't even want to know how many times I replayed that song, I'm genuinely so happy I understand this song, since I listened to it a lot as a young vocaloid fan. It's probably not a surprise that I'm a huge vocal synth and Miku fan (which I need to also make a blogpost about, AHH how do I make all these blogposts for all these interests??) And, idk, something about understanding what the queen Miku is saying... it's such a rush of euphoria! Anyways, other songs I've understood mostly are: "Sonic Drive", "Genki no SHAWAA", "A Cruel Angel's Thesis", "Kibō no Kakera", etc. Finally understanding more is super inspiring for me to keep going down the long, trecheraous path that is 日本語. And I can't wait to learn more.

Now for what you've been dying to know, why the hell did I combine these two vastly different language updates?! Well it was kinda because I like to ramble but the real reason is because I have a little project I want to do with these two languages. If you don't already know, I'm a huge Yugioh fan. (And if you didn't... I implore to glance at this website for at least five seconds.) One thing I really like about Yugioh is how many countries and cultures are included in the story, seriously diversity is awesome, even if it's not the most accurate? But anyways, one nitpick I've had is that 'how the hell do all these characters speak to eachother??' Obviously they all need to speak the same language or else no one would understand the plot but... what if I wrote a fanfic where everyone spoke their own language? I mean, the premise is really interesting imo, like how would the yamis communicate with their hikaris/omotes? Or how would the Ishtar family communicate with everyone in Japan? What about characters like Pegasus or Rebecca? Think of all the canon divergence people! And with inshallah knowing English, Japanese, and Somali, I am able to write this dream fanfic. (well, except for the von Schroeders and their German but I don't have much incentive to learn German. All of Europe will have to speak English for this AU.) I'll talk more about it in a future blogpost but this fic idea alone excites me enough to stay consistent with my language learning, and hopefully you'll decide to read it when it comes out. (I encourage you to, even if you only speak English. You'll get the full experience of not knowing what the hell everyone's saying too!) And that's the end of today's blogpost, err I don't really know how to end these? I also started a language learning tumblr blog here and yeaaah. Yap seesion over.