So while on holiday I’m playing a lot of Animal Crossing in Japanese, even though it’s way beyond my current level.

I use Google translate a lot and…somehow I don’t think this is quite right 🤣

I am taking some of my annual leave time to create dataviz templates for my slide design course members, and I'm super enjoying how intuitive Excel/PPT is. 😑

Apparently Excel/PPT defines "solid line" differently than I do.

So much fun. Really. Truly. Having the time of my life here.

I feel a little lost without a good open world game to play, but I am giving animal crossing a try…in Japanese.

It’s beyond my level but I’m pushing through anyway.

I am having way too much fun with this 🤣

Yay happy Friday to me, which marks the start of my annual winter leave (a big perk of running my own company!)

I finally finished Burning Shores, which completes Horizon Forbidden West.

Got 250 hours out of this one 🙂‍↕️

Sadly, I have no open world game to play now 😫 😭

💪 vocab done for the day.

Just 3 more days left before the JLPT exam, incl today

I’ve been focusing more on review lately and am looking forward to getting back into learning new N4 level stuff.

To anyone else doing the JLPT on Sunday: 頑張りましょう！

Prepping for my language exam this Sunday.

Trying to speed run my books so I can read fast during the reading comprehension section.

The last time I took a standardized exam was the GRE.

…in 2007 (or 2006?)

And I’ve never been good at standardized tests.

😫😬🥹 eep

I wonder what she thinks of twitter now 🙃

Anyway, my newsletter is pretty cool & sometimes I even predict the future 🧙✨

It's mostly about presentation skills but I'm also feisty about social justice.

(This is what I said Nov 2022 👇)

on my mind is how, when musk took over twitter, I mentioned in my newsletter I was leaving b/c I expected it to become an "unbearable cesspool of hate speech, lies, harassment, or worse"

99% of replies were supportive

(my newsletter subscribers are pretty rad)

...😂 But then there was:

To sum it up:

Please don't dismiss how much PowerPoint could actually help you with the variety of communication materials you need to do in your work.

If you'd like to see more of what PowerPoint can do, I have a full length talk here:
www.echorivera.com/free-training

My home pic for sure.

See also my DND setting name 🤣

I love video games, so you’d think gamification of learning or habits would be my jam.

But usually it feels empty and hollow to me.

Random points or awards don’t mean much.

…but in this app (Renshuu) I earn points for studying my Japanese vocab/kanji and get to build up a little garden 🥰 kawaii

Phewww. Almost forgot to do my vocab.

I really don’t know where time went today.

I feel like I barely did anything today, but not from intentional rest.

It’s like I lost time 😅

My puppers, Sage, was an uncapturable blur in photos as a puppy.

Now that he is an elderly gentleman, he poses dramatically for special effect.

He knows he’s handsome 🤣

Next Sunday is the Japanese language exam (JLPT) so I’ll be spending this week doing more mock tests and binge watching Comprehensible Input videos.

I’m nervous but also will be glad to get this test out of the way.

#LanguageLearning
#LearningJapanese

Just finished reading another short story in Japanese. 🙌

Graded readers are super helpful.

One thing I didn’t anticipate with #LearningJapanese is how much having aphantasia makes learning kanji feel impossible.

I’m crossing out furigana early to try and brute force myself into learning but idk

💪 got my vocab/kanji practice out of the way before even getting out of bed today.

I wish I could create a cute fun app like this for learning slide design and using plain language.

Probably would make learning communication skills a lot more fun 😅