I like the plug and play experience. Recently, I developed a desktop app for people to learn Japanese, but it required MacOS users to first install brew and tesseract. It may not seem much effort to developers, but these extra steps could detract the user experience and make it less accessible.

On Windows, it is easy to compile the entire Tesseract into one exe file and all I did was copy a compiled Tesseract.exe from another Github repo (Probably not the safest idea).

On Mac, I have tried rebuilding all the separate dependencies and Tesseract but to no avail. I…

The Power of Immersive Learning

Back in 2017 when I completed Persona 5 in Japanese, I was blown away at how many Japanese expressions I learned throughout the game. My speed in skimming through in-game dialog and text also improved noticeably.

A lot of people use language exchange apps like HelloTalk to talk to Japanese people, but I prefer playing games and talking casually with Japanese people. It’s completely free, less awkward, and you don’t have to teach them English in return.

Find multiplayer games with an active player base

Go to openrec.tv and look at the most streamed multiplayer games. Dead by daylight, Apex Legends, Among Us, Splatoon 2. Monster Hunter is also pretty active on Twitter. Personally I have only played Apex and Splatoon 2 with other Japanese players but your interests may vary.

Create a Japanese Twitter account

This is super important. A new Japanese twitter account without a single latin…

Install AltStore on Your Computer

On your Mac/PC, install AltStore.

Once AltStore is installed, you will see a diamond shaped icon on the top right of your activity ray (bottom right for Windows).

Connect your phone to your computer with a cable. Click on the diamond shaped icon and install AltStore on your phone.

Thanks to community effort, we can programmatically access Nintendo Switch App’s API at zero cost. This allows us to build apps capable of communicating with games connected to Nintendo Switch Online (NSO), as well as getting user information like games played and playtime.

Overview

By training models in Google’s Teachable Machine to learn our gestures, we could swing our hands or make a face to send the corresponding reaction command to Animal Crossing’s API.

Reverse Engineer Animal Crossing’s API

The NSO app on the phone allows us to send reaction commands to the game. By using a tool called mitmproxy, we could know what requests are sent from our phone and simulate the reaction command.

brew install mitmproxy

Or use pip install mitmproxy.

Run mitmproxy

mitmiproxy -h

Install the mitmproxy certificate on your phone

With your phone connected to the same internet as your computer, visit http://mitm.it/ and install the certificate. …

With Yomichan, you can effortlessly add Japanese words and kanji to your Anki decks for review later.

Yomichan is probably the best Chrome plugin I have used to date. Long gone are the days of copywriting flashcards onto spreadsheets and migrating them to Anki. With Yomichan, you can easily click on a word and add them to your Anki deck for review.

Installation

If you have Chrome installed, you can directly install the Yomichan extension at the Chrome store. Once installed, relaunch Chrome, and head to Settings > Extensions > Yomichan > Extension Options.

Here you can enable audio, pick your…

Access SplatNet on Your Desktop without mitmproxy or manually modifying browser cookies.

You can download the Desktop Client here https://github.com/mathewthe2/splatnet-desktop/releases

This will be the file structure for this app.

splatnet-desktop/
├── package.json
├── main.js
├── views/
│   ├── loading.html
│   ├── logging-in.html
├── login.js
├── nso.js
├── stores.js

When the user first opens the application, they will be directed to a Nintendo Login Page by the logic in login.js. Once they log in and connect their account, they will see a logging-in message in logging-in.html while nso.js retrieves the tokens and cookies required to access SplatNet. Upon closing and reopening…