self-studying diary

引っ越した！ I moved!

24.07.2026

coconut matcha latte & lots of bunpro!

22.07.2026

reviews for the day: ✅

I'm Lena, from Germany, and a recent graduate of Natural Language Processing, where I specifically researched a low-resource dialect for my final thesis. NLP may be drifting towards AI in recent years, but there's still many of us who oppose this development and are just interested in working with language technologies that actually benefit humanity, like language documentation and preservation, or sustainable technologies like Ecosia. So don't hate me, I'm not an AI bro.

For the past decade or so, I've been learning Japanese on and off. As a recent graduate who has a part-time job coming up in a few months (so I'm not even really job hunting), I have a lot of free time and really wanted to use it to study Japanese more seriously. At the end of this year / start of next year, I am planning on going to Japan for around 4 months for a short working holiday, so I have serious motivation to improve my Japanese skills! Right now I am at around an N3 level, though I haven't taken classes in a long time and my self studying has been all over the place - so who really knows.

While I'm in Japan, I also want to work with language preservation (especially of Ainu) if I can find an opportunity, so I've been spending some time researching the Ainu language of the indigenous people of Japan. Maybe I even want to learn some of the language, if I can find the time and resources!

Besides Japanese, I speak English (as you can tell), and am also self-studying Brazilian Portuguese as it's my partner's native language. Though I haven't really been doing that after completing a B1 class last year, so I need to get back into it...

I really hope to find some like-minded people on here, who self-study languages (especially Japanese), so please interact with that & I'll drop a follow (main blog: @whxsperofsprxng) - can't wait to meet you all (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)