This is where I write about stuff. ✍️

  1. A year into learning Japanese

    It’s been just over a year since I started learning Japanese so I thought it was a good time to stop, reflect over my journey and consider what I’ve learnt. I started on 19th April 2020 and since then I’ve dedicated 1,378 hours to studying (according to my timer app). That’s just over 25 hours a week, quite a lot on top of a full time job. In this post, I will try to justify how I spent that much time on hobby (neglecting everything else in my life) as well as point people to the resources I used...

    Read more 10 min read

  2. How I felt about inheriting £200,000

    People don’t like to talk about money, much less money that’s inherited. But as much as it is an extremely privileged situation to be in, there’s a bunch of feelings to disentangle when you inherit a large sum of money. Especially if you’re not used to it and don’t come from a wealthy background. You have to navigate the grief you have for the person who has died, guilt for benefiting from their death, and anxiety over what to do with it all.

    If you want resources, there are countless articles that explain the administrative process of what to do when someone dies. And there are many other dry personal finance articles that assume you want to maximise your return on your inheritance money. But I couldn’t find much out there that touch on the emotional side of inheritance. So that’s why I want to break the silence and describe the journey I went through. I also ended up doing something a bit unusual and not often talked about...

    Read more 8 min read

  3. I read my first book in Japanese 🎉

    Last year, I embarked on a journey to learn Japanese. I set myself an objective to read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (or ハリー ポッターと賢者の石) by the end of 2020. Two weeks ago, I accomplished this goal. In this post, I describe my journey so far, approach to reading, and will present some fun stats and graphs I recorded along the way...

    Read more 7 min read