Can you believe January is almost over? I was reviewing the month and found that I'm behind in my January goal. My goal for January was to complete a JavaScript course I bought years ago as a way to refresh my JS knowledge and it have been going well until I got to objects and now I'm kind of stuck.

I'm stuck not because the problem sets are difficult but because it's messy, and life has been a handful, so the last thing I want to do at the end of a long day is bang my head on code that's messy.

learning Astro

It leaves me in an interesting position. For February I was going to do a 24-days of code thing but I may have to delay that. But what to do instead? I've been interested in learning Astro for some time now. My personal blog is in 11ty but I don't love it. I like working with ui components in the way React does it and Astro seems like a great deal. So I've decided that between now and this time next month, I will do doing some Astro work and redo my personal website.

learning Japanese

At the end of December I started learning Japanese with Duolingo. I recently completed a 30-day streak and consistently hitting the 90s in accuracy. It has been quite interesting. I know some Japanese from years of watching Anime but learning the characters - Hiragana and Katagana, so far has been the most interesting. I find myself getting more and more into the rabbit hole of the language. I recently installed a Japanese keyboard on my phone to see if I can write some (mostly) Hiragana because it's easier for me than Katagana. I have not started on Kanji yet, taking it slow and steady.

I don't know what learning a new language that contains characters does to your brain but I get joy learning something new and challenging, trying to remember the individual characters and their sounds and the meaning of the different sounds combined together like すし which is Sushi - a combination of the su (す) sound and shi (し) sound. I'm now more aware of how we pronounce some words wrongly. For example, the car brand Daihatsu is usually pronounced die-hat-su but if you break it down, again in Hiragana because it's the easiest for me to understand it's actually da-i-ha-tsu (だ い は つ). Four sounds make the word. Anyway it's very interesting and I love it.