Japanese

I’ve coasted on my Japanese skills for probably a decade or so.

I told my wife I felt an email I received from the home builder we were talking to sounded cold, and she replied with my initial email sounded cold too! I was first upset because I asked her to check the email, but then I realized many things, mainly that it’s not her responsibility and I never asked her to check the tone of the email.

So my Japanese can appear semi-fluent, but that makes such mistakes make it sound like I’m a blunt cold foreigner as opposed to a little buddy just doing his best.

The current easiest solution is to just feed things into ChatGPT or something like that, which I do on occasion, but that also makes it feel like the humanity is leaving my body in some ways.

Really, there are likely 20-30 expressions that I just need to memorize when to use, and so IF I use ChatGPT, I need to do regular boring studying of all the phrases it gives me and understanding why it’s giving me them. I need to compare these phrases to what would be said when speaking to someone, so when meeting someone I can match the tone of emails I send.

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We leave the door open to my son’s play area and he has left it to explore the outside world. I’m going to make sure he doesn’t bump his head so I don’t get in trouble.

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EDIT: There’s more than this, there’s the dance of language that has gotten away from me. I need to get the dance back too. I think I had/have it to some extent.