Weekly Praise Thread – 16 January 2026

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1. On a spousal visa now. So if things don’t go as planned I have some new options and not limited to the English teaching ALT grind machine.

   Had a very relaxing and productive month long vacation. Studied maybe 5 hours a day on JLPT N1 and Kanken level 2. Need to build some kind of schedule instead of juggling all things in one day.

2. I’ve been doing some sidework as a camera operator at a Japanese inhouse video production unit for the past half a year and as it’s an all Japanese environment i’m starting to notice that my Japanese language ability has definitely seen improvement.

   I met up with an old Japanese friend I hadn’t seen in years the other day and felt confident in speaking Japanese the entire time.

   It’s certainly not as good as I’d like it to be yet but I’ll take the small win.

3. The crow I met during lunchtime last month came back to the same spot last week, he recognized me. I’ll try again today.

4. My Korean teacher told me I’m improving and invited me to join intermediate-level group lessons. It kinda came out of nowhere so I’m pretty happy about it.

   And after playing guitar for like 20 years, I played and sang a full song in front of another person. Granted it was just *that song* (you know the one) in front of my wife (at her request), but still. And really it’s been a ton of fun practicing strumming correctly and then trying to sing while doing it, which is a thing that’s defeated me for a *long* time. So now I’m trying to find other acoustic crowd-pleasers to practice so I’m not just *that guy* that only can play *that song*.

5. 7 straight hours in the baba snack with shacho last night and he let everyone have the day off today. When he’s drunk he usually says we can have the next day off (and then everyone but him shows up to work at normal hours), but this time he actually meant it!

6. I’m so glad my partner isn’t one of those “Japanese food is the best food!!” types. he asked me to make Mexican food this weekend, and I am more than happy to oblige. I need to improve on my carnitas!

7. Small praise. I was standing on the right side of the train with my bag on the ground, but due to an influx of people boarding I got pushed all the way to the left side. When the crowd let up, I finally went got back to the right side (since that’s the side I’ll get off), someone told me a pin fell off my bag (my country’s pavilion pin from Expo) and handed it to me. Apparently he picked it up and held it the entire time, looking for a chance to return it to me.

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