The "I made this myself" affect

I noticed something recently—no matter how bad a tool or solution is, if I made it myself I always seem to be more attached to it. This certainly holds true in the realm of language learning, where I’ve used a wide variety of study tools—some free, some purchased, and many homemade.

Homemade study tools

Some of my favorite homemade study tools include a Ruby script that watches a directory and when I download example images into it, it resizes and optimize the images for an Anki deck. And of course speaking of Anki, there is a whole world of homemade tools you can get into there! I’ve written scripts to build Anki flashcards from anime, keep track of kanji cards, and even a fairly in-depth browser extension to make Anki cards from graded reader sentences on Satori Reader.

There was a season when I built and ran an entire public website where I gathered a pile of new words to learn so that when I had time to sit down and study, I knew what to work on next. Of course, it wasn’t uncommon for me to look up from my screen late on a weekend evening and realize I had put more time into my study tools that day than I did actually learning Japanese. Even so, it always helped me stay excited to use my study tools which helped me come back even on the days when I wasn’t really in the mood to study.

How does this help me now?

As I reached the intermediate level of Japanese language study, I began to select pre-built tools in hopes of increasing my learning speed. I figured if I didn’t have to maintain dozens of pieces of software—seriously, these examples are just the tip of the iceberg—I could roll that building time back into studying instead. And it worked for the most part. I had a great time with tools like jpdb.io and bunpro, and they helped prepare me for language school by reading my first Japanese manga and novels. Along the way though, my spark for any kind of recurring daily study routine began to go out.

Today I’m looking ahead to what’s next for me in my language journey, and it occurs to me that this might be a theme I should reconsider. Maybe one way to keep me engaged day after day, is to put a little bit of that “I made this myself” sparkle back in my study routine. ✨

To that end, I’ve come up with a plan to build a little Wanikani extension this weekend, and we’ll see if it’s enough to get me to finally start using that study tool more regularly! 🙏🏻