These days I have been considering seriously to keep improving my Japanese while using most of the Emacs tools and ecosystem, the main reason for that is because I just want to stay focus as much as I can, avoiding context switching and having most of my sources on my pc using the tool I like it.

For one side, I use elfeed to suscribe to some Japanese Youtube channels and blogs, I play the videos using mpv. also there is nov.el and PDF tools for reading books. I get my books from different sources, There is a site called Aozora Bunko for example, that is a huge library of books that you can read for free online or local.

Org mode is a nice way to take notes, schedule tasks, among others and combined with Org-drill allow me to create flashcards and practice recognition and recall. I use Org-capture and abbrev-mode to create new vocabulary, grammar or expressions on the fly with some templates I made, using Magit You can track all the changes on these files, this is important because in case that you break your desk, it’s easier to reverse any undesired change. Furthermore, I can easily record this new things. Given that I have to write in the language Emacs has its own japanese input method, while it’s not perfect, it gets the job done, I can just press C-\ to switch between japanese and english or spanish.

Other important thing I have to add is a dictionary, quick-sdcv is a package that wrap the terminal dictionary sdcv, this allow me with some keybindings to look up words quickly, if I am reading an epub file or news I can just put the cursor on the word and display the meaning in other buffer, I can copy and capture the vocabulary in an org file, or anything else. And there are some IRC groups in Libera.chat where you can chat in japanese, but I do not use it that much to be honest.

Finally, one thing I didn’t try yet, is using a LLM inside Emacs, I just use sometimes ChatGPT in the browser with some interesting results, it can be a useful tool, but I don’t want it to become an essential part of my workflow. However, I still not completely closed to incorporate this tool inside my workflow.

Okay, but was it necessary to bring all these things into Emacs? Well, maybe not. But if it helps me keep improving my Japanese and enjoying the experience, then it’s worth the workaround.