2026-07-26 21:45:04

On the 1st of January, 2026 importing a dictionary of every Japanese name took 3 hours.

Thousand and thousands of hours were spent by people optimising dictionary imports to make them as fast as possible.

Through hours of compression, you could get it down to a humane 1 hour 36 minutes.

But still, 1 hour 36 is too long. No one wants to spend hours importing a dictionary. But if we make the dictionary too small, it's not useful.

Developers had chosen a middle ground. They had long forgone including names from anime or manga, as it simply was too many. Instead they opted for visual novels.

When all hope was lost in creating the ultimate name dictionary, it happened.

One crazy developer gets it down to 90 seconds, a decrease of 95% – a far cry from the current number 1 on the leaderboard.

His findings spawned an informal speedrunning competition, where developers across the world seemingly found impossible tricks and had to rethink dictionaries in ways previously unimaginable.

All to answer one simple question:

Who can import dictionaries the fastest?

The Start of the Race

First, a few basics.

Japanese names are weird.

So weird, in fact, the average Japanese speaker has no clue how to read someones name. No, seriously. The first thing they ask upon hearing someones name is:

お名前は、漢字ではどのように書きますか。

Or in English:

How do I write your name?

You see, Japanese has three alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.

There are 46 Hiragana characters.

46 Katakana characters,

51,398 Kanji characters.

But don't worry! You only need to memorise around 3000 realistically. Well, 5000 if you plan to go into university or something.

Each Kanji can have multiple ways to say it.

生 is read as "nama" – fresh, natural, raw, live, etc.

But it doesn't just mean "nama". It can also be read as ikiru, umareru, haeru, and about 150 other readings.

So you don't just need to memorise 5000 but also a lot of readings too. Something more like 15,000 items.

What's in a Japanese name?

Japanese names typically use kanji, for example "大翔" has 2 kanji.

1. 大 - Big, read as "dai" or "oo".
2. 翔 - Soar, read as "to" or "bu".

Together as a name they are typically read as "hirohito", which means "soaring greatly".

But actually, that name can also be read as:

• Haruto
• Yamato
• Taito
• Daito
• Taiga
• etc etc

So you see, there are 2 big problems with Japanese names:

1. Just because you can physically see a name on the screen does not mean you know how to read it. You can guess, but you may be wrong.
2. If someone says their name to you, you have no idea how to write it.

for (1) authors will write the name in another alphabet to explain it.

For (2) you have a really cute conversation with someone over their name. Usually something like "Wow! Your parents picked pretty kanji, I like it".

The Problem

As a learner to Japanese, I have a really fun problem.

When reading a book, playing a game etc I genuinely have no idea what someone is called unless it is explicitly stated to me. Multiple times.

Japanese people will see the name in hiragana once and remember it, but for me I can't do that. I'm too new to the language to do that.

The Solution

In the interwebs there exists many a dweeb, nerd, otaku or worse – an AI bot.

These wonderful nerds spend all their time cataloguing data.

There are websites like VNDB or Anilist where people catalogue every visual novel, anime, light novel or manga to exist.

These same people go out of their way to learn the character names and create wonderful catalogues of them.

You can look up your favourite anime and find the characters name, official spelling, all nicknames, and information about them.

As a learner this is massive!

Since I play a lot of games, I use GameSentenceMiner to be able to use Yomitan in game.

🥱 Yomitan is a dictionary app. You download dictionaries and can look things up.

Here is me looking up a word in Yomitan.

So last year I contributed to GameSentenceMiner a fancy dictionary.

Anytime I played a new game, it would automatically update to have character information in it.

Not only the name, but a description and image too.

No longer did I have to guess Kanji names! I could see them right there, in my dictionary!

But then someone said to me:

I don't use GSM, is there anyway you can make this for my game? 😦

So then I thought... Hey... I had written code to make this work for a game.

What if I just go through all visual novels on VNDB and do it for them?

After doing that, it ended up being around 3 gb. For a dictionary. FOR A DICTIONARY!?!

So I cut it back. I compressed it immensely. I removed features.

No more anime / manga / lightnovel support. Only visual novels. Other creators of similar dictionaries agreed with me.

This became 300mb, or about 6 million name entries.

6 million entries for names is a lot.

It took me 1 hour to import it into Yomitan. 30 minutes to import it into a competitor app named JL.

Basically, this dictionary was impossible to use. It took so long to import into any app it just wasn't worth it.

The Race

It all started when a friend of mine, who builds Manabi an app for learning Japanese on IOS, mentioned he is doing performance work to improve Manabi's speed.

I hit him with a quick "hey try out my massive dict".

Manhhao, who is building a Manabi competitor was the first to complete a run.

90 seconds. That's a 97.5% decrease!

Manhhao achieved this by writing their own JSON Parser specifically for the Yomitan dictionary schema.

Yomitan dictionaries are JSON files.

You know how in infrastructure everything is a YAML? Well in dictionaries it's either HTML, or JSON masquerading as HTML.

Yomitan dictionaries contained "structured content" which are just nested JSON structs pretending to be HTML.

When you import a Yomitan dictionary, a traditional JSON parser goes through every single term and does something like:

json["glossary"][0]["tag"]

You can see how it would be nested JSON once you look at a dictionary that uses it.

Instead of parsing JSON at import time, Manhhao had a thought similar to that of Charlie Munger.

Instead of parsing all JSON at import time, why don't we parse it once the user looks it up?

Since they are rendering it with Javascript, parsing the JSON from a single index and rendering the HTML is trivial.

This increases dictionary lookups slightly, but decreases imports significantly.

Then 5 minutes later Manabi claps back with 58 seconds. The first sub 60!

What's in a Yomitan dictionary, anyway?

Desribe what a dict is and what it contains, and how we build it

second round

The race is on

At this point I dm'd ae to ask for help.

ae has significantly more resources than I do in terms of compute, storage and bandwidth.

So I hit him up.

ai usage

2026-05-09 04:51:02

The dream of being able to immerse in Japanese games using all the tools you love (GSM, Luna, JL) on a handheld device has simply not been possible.

Until now.

This blog post will show you, reader who already has an immersion setup on Windows, how to do the exact same thing on the Steamdeck.

But on Steamdeck.

We're going to do this by dual-booting Windows and SteamOS on the Steamdeck.

But firstly, why dual-boot and not go full Linux?

1. But they are workarounds.
2. Pretty much every immersion tool you love is on Windows.
3. Combining immersion tools that work on Windows with VNs that only work on Windows, and trying to do that on Linux is neigh on impossible.

So why not go full Windows?

SteamOS is specifically made for the Steamdeck.

I know I do!

If you want to attempt the Linux only way™️, read this:

SteamOS Beta

You should join the SteamOS Beta.

This is because it has BIOS drivers you need to make it work on Windows.

1. To update to beta, press the Steam button or open the Steam menu.
2. Select the Settings option.
3. Go to the System option.
4. Select Beta participation.
5. Change the System update channel from Stable to Beta.
6. Restart and apply the update.

Steamdeck password

You need to set a Steamdeck password to do adminy things.

Follow this:

Installing Windows

If you want a more hand-holdy video, this is good:

1. You need this to resize your partition.

2. Use KDE partition manager in the repair image.
3. I chose 11 IOT as it uses less resources, and 11 has great touch support.
4. Put them onto a USB and install them:

Look for "setup information" file type, right click and "Install".

It should boot back into Windows.

Connect to WiFi and install Windows updates.

Now after doing that, restart the steamdeck.

Go back to Windows updates, click on "Advanced Options" and then "Optional updates"

Update everything again.

Now let's configure Clover.

When you dualboot normally you can choose between 3 things:

1. Grub
2. Refind
3. Clover

I believe Clover has controller support whereas the others don't.

Open cmd as admin.

bcdedit -set {globalsettings} highestmode on

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation" /v RealTimeIsUniversal /d 1 /t REG_DWORD /f

Sets hardware clock to UTC rather than local time.

If you have ever dual booted Linux and Windows you know this is required.

• Linux typically assumes the hardware clock is set to UTC and converts to local time in software
• Windows typically assumes the hardware clock is set to local time directly
• When you switch between OSes, each one "corrects" the clock based on its assumption, causing the time to jump forward or backward

Now shut down your Steamdeck, go into boot manager and boot into SteamOS.

Follow this video to fix it :)

There were some status.txt

In the docs it says:

Use this only if you have Windows installed on microSD / external SSD and if Windows keeps hijacking the bootloader!

Since I don't use that, I don't care.

Optimise Windows

Now Windows should work fine, let's optimise it to work even better.

Your life will be much easier.

Here's what I did:

1. Ran all Standard tweaks.
   1. Additionally disable Background Apps (to speed things up)
   2. Disable Bing search in start menu
   3. Show hidden files and extensions
   4. Enable S3 sleep (this makes the Steamdeck hibernate)

Disable All Updates:

Dual booting often breaks because Windows update breaks it.

I will disable all updates, but Windows Defender will still update its threat lists in the background so it's not all terrible.

On the Config page do this:

• Set Up Autologin so you can just go straight to gaming.
• All .Net frameworks.

In apps install:

• Anki
• Visual C++ 2015 64bit
• 7zip

Now open Powershell in admin and run this:

Set-WinSystemLocale -SystemLocale ja-JP

Japanese games require Japanese locale :)

And do this:

• Open Settings → Time & language → Language & region
• Under "Country or region", select Japan from the dropdown

While you're there, also install Japanese language support.s

Mining Games

Now let's set up our mining stuff.

Anki

Set up Anki and login, sync or whatever.

Go to your Anki addons folder on Desktop (assuming you have it)

C:\Users\Bee\AppData\Roaming\Anki2\addons21

It all works.

GSM

We'll be using GameSentenceMiner.

Go to this and install it:

Disable texthooker on startup.

I play visual novels so I don't need them to be animated 😄

But if you play games, activate animation!

I set AI up:

Then set MeikiOCR in Overlay:

In Advanced:

Close GSM and reopen it, my OBS was not synced properly until I did this the first time.

In OBS go to settings, output and then set these:

Now in Video tab:

Basically all these settings say:

• I am playing a visual novel that does not move very fast, give me much lower settings to preserve battery life etc.

Finally in GSM enable "Start Overlay on Startup":

Open GSM Overlay and set Yomitan up, just export your settings from your desktop and move them over.

Pro GSM tip:

Go to settings -> Database Management and download the special Yomitan dictionary for character information in your games!

While you're here, set up Jiten reader. Use this for Custom Word CSS to make it look normal. The default CSS is horrific to look at.

.jiten-word.new { color: inherit !important; }
.jiten-word.blacklisted { color: inherit !important; }
.jiten-word.mature { color: inherit !important; }
.jiten-word.due { color: inherit !important; }
.jiten-word.young { color: inherit !important;}

Also in settings for Websocket remove all Websockets apart from 2333.

2333 will be used by Lunahook, this saves some cpu cycles as GSM regularly checks to see if those sockets are open.

GSM keyboard shortcuts in overlay todo

Steamdeck controls

Now install this:

This lets you control Steamdeck specific things like fans / gpu usage etc.

Lunatranslate

Install this:

Turn off Google translate.

Put it into Windows defender allow list so it doesn't break.

Turn on networking.

Just make sure the webhooks in GSM hook up to it.

Random tools

I installed Copyparty to let me copy and paste games from my desktop to my SD:

It's like FTP but:

1. You run the .exe
2. It says "enter this IP in your browser"
3. You get automatic retries, able to make folders etc.

A lot less finicky for me.

Cause GSM records the game itself and not the window (by default), your screenshots won't be yellow.

Windows nightlight has a max limit to it, F.lux does not. You can go super red.

Use this to instantly load your gaming library on startup. Lunatranslator and GSM should auto switch to it.

Games

Steam games do not work :/

2026-05-04 16:25:32

Hi I vibe coded this addon

it's a sorting addon for new flashcards in anki.

Other sorting algorithms:

• Go by frequency alone, so similar kanji aren't bundled up together

this addon uses an advanced algorithm (I actually wrote it, but the AI implemented it. No idea if it's the most optimal, but I was going back and forth and double checking my new card order and this one looks like it works)

The idea is:

Reduce the struggle. Words with all Kanji known or only kana appear first, UNLESS there is a super high frequency word you are missing

Basically, if you know all the kanji the word is super easy so you should see it first.

it also works for other things not just visual novels

Algorithm

1. Candidate selection: The default query is note:Kiku is:new -is:suspended. Review and learning cards are ignored.
2. Known-kanji extraction: The add-on searches mature cards using matureQuery or the generated matureDays query. It reads the Expression field from those mature Kiku notes and extracts kanji characters. If a kanji appears there, it counts as known.
3. Frequency source selection: The active list comes from jitenFrequencyListId. The default is global. The add-on tries to use:
   • the fresh cache for the selected list
   • the live Jiten export API for the selected list
   • the stale cache for the selected list
   • the bundled Global snapshot when the selected list is global
   • Kiku FreqSort only if no Jiten data is available
4. Per-card features: For each candidate card, the add-on reads:
   • Expression
   • extracted kanji count
   • known kanji count
   • Jiten rank from the selected list
   • Kiku FreqSort rank as fallback
5. Blended scoring: The default score is:This means:
   • absolute frequency score from Jiten, or FreqSort as fallback
   • multiplied by a readability adjustment:
     • all_kanji_known: 1.00
     • kana_only: 0.92
     • unknown kanji: 1 - min(0.18 * unknown_kanji_count, 0.54)
   • plus a small partial-known bonus:
     • 0.04 * coverage_score for cards that still have unknown kanji

• similar-frequency known-kanji cards usually beat kana-only cards
• super common kana-only cards can still rise early
• super common one-unknown-kanji cards can outrank weaker easy cards
• harder unknown-kanji cards still sink unless their frequency is very strong

There are also optional strategies, easy_first_tiered_v1 and balanced_ease_v1, but the default and recommended path is frequency_first_soft_v1.

2026-05-04 16:20:41

hi i vibe coded this super simple anki addon

go to tools -> Export Mature Words to Clipboard

It will ask you to set up your cards, like what Mature is and what Anki card field has the word

After that everytime you click this, it will export all mature words to your clipboard

No features other than that.

Use cases

• External word trackers like Migaku, Jiten, JPDB can use this
• Put it into ChatGPT or something
• Excel?
• I don't know, its just a really easy way to copy mature anki cards.

2026-04-13 01:03:44

Like any Linux nerd I have been into ricing for a while, stalking the good folks over on r/unixporn and making my own Hyprland rice.

But for the past 6 months or so I've been using KDE.

And the past 2 weeks I have gone back from Wayland to X11 (it's just more stable)

This just so happened to coincide with me discovering this community:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MoeDesktop/

It's like r/unixporn but for classic 2005 otaku desktops, invoking the feeling of Moe (pronounced mo-eh).

Which just means cuteness (or something like that) in Japanese

So I thought I would try my hand at a Moe rice.

My first stop was this KDE Aero Plasma theme, since I'm a big big fan of the Vista aesthetic.

I installed it in one Paru command and it worked 🥳 My desktop does look like Vista now!!

Colour Matching

I'm using this wallpaper from Nekopara:

It's really cute!

There's things in Python you can do to study the images colours using ImageMagik and match your colourscheme to it.

So after Aero and my wallpaper I did this!

Cursor

In KDE you can edit your cursor super easily

I went into KDE cursor store and got my Miku cursor!

Building Custom Widgets

Like any good Otaku and doujinsoft fan I needed widgets.

Remember how cool it was in Vista!?

So I looked at the defaults.

I added the Photo Gallery widget

Because I take so many screenshots of anime / visual novels I just pointed it at my folder.

In this game her eyes reminded me of Oshi No Ko!

Second widget is weather!

I live in the UK

Somedays it's super sunny, the next it's raining.

Last week I went to work in a coat. Everyone else was in cute dresses and skirts.... I was the odd one out :/

Never again since I added this widget!

But I had the thirst for more. MORE MOE WIDGETS!

So like any good 2026 coder I asked my AI bot to build them for me lol

City/landmark

Like any late 20s white girl that visited Japan, I miss it dearly

I told AI to build me a widget where once a day it'll show me a location from Japan, a photo of it, the Wikipedia description and let me click on it to go to Wikipedia:

Works quite well!

I even asked it to make curated lists, so there's one for the West of Tokyo (I lived in Suginami-ku, so I miss that part in particular)

Word a day

Every day (well, every hour) it picks a random word from my Anki deck and shows it to me.

No Anki? No problem!

We can change it to Local only and see a local word list of curated, fun words :)

This is prettier than my Anki cards anyway, which are.... full of HTML and ugly...

Moe Clock

I built this from a GitHub repo called Moe_Counter or something

It's just a clock, pretty cool!

https://count.getloli.com/

Someone did this on Windows already so I just made it a KDE widget :)

Split Clock

I wanna see:

• The time in Tokyo and London (where I live)
• If it's daylight or not
• Moon phase
• If the sun and moon are visible at the same time

So I vibe coded this!

The moon is not visible in Tokyo rn

Conclusion

This is my current desktop!

2026-03-25 15:27:24

5000 words.

I hit 4000 words 87 days ago.

That's 11.49 mature words a day.

Stats since 4k words:

Stats

10k average daily characters.

2 hours of visual novels a day on average.

Since I hit 4k words in December:

800k chars read, 128 hours spent reading.

I've averaged 1 hour a day of reading (work....) and reading an average of 9.1k chars a day.

I've come across 15.5k unique words, and 5.8k of those I had never seen before.

In that time I read:

• Limelight Lemonade Jam
• Marco and the Galaxy Dragon
• Summer Pockets Reflection Blue

In terms of Anki:

332 hours studying Japanese since 5k words.

I've been doing Migaku Memory Japanese Course for like 3 months now for funsies.

What I made

Firstly for GameSentenceMiner I added these things:

• Added tokenisation to GSM stats
• Added per game stats
• Added Anki stats

For Yomitan:

• Added popup blur when under frequency

I also made an Anki addon that turns your mature words into a freq dict so you can combine both of them.

• Added automatic updates to Yomitan

For Manabitan, a fork of Yomitan I:

• Added MDX support
• Made it way faster with Anki dedupe
• Added themes

OpenAI awarded me free Codex for my contributions to the above,

I also made Bee's Character Dictionary:

To make name dicts.

And also Bee's Custom Dict Maker for easy plaintext Yomitan dicts:

What my routine looks like:

• Anki - Every morning. Usually 10 - 15 mins.
• Migaku Memory - 5 to 10 mins
• Visual Novels - between 1 and 6 hours a day, depends on how hard I work.

Since December I now work at FAANG so I don't have much time to immerse anymore, still it is the most important thing to me.

I currently do 10 new Anki cards a day, some number of Migaku cards if I can be bothered, and I just read a VN to finish it off.

I don't watch anime all that much, maybe 6 hours total since December.

As for manga, maybe 15 minutes...

I just read visual novels :P

My plan is to just continue this. I'm making progress, albeit slowly.

Goals

• Hit 6k words by August 2026
• Read Kanon in the winter
• Read Manosaba this year
• Read STEINS;GATE this year