[T-995] My wife got angry when I showed her my custom immersion gear

“Are you crazy?” she said in a way that made me think she was the crazy one.

“Those are the only earbuds I can wear and they don’t make them like that anymore.”

She was talking about a pair of old school iPhone earbuds. You know, the plain ones, that don’t have the rubbery bits violating your inner ear.

I was showing her a pair I mutilated for my immersion needs.

In her view, I destroyed a pair of fine vintage earbuds. In my view, I eliminated the only weakness that made them inferior to their modern wireless counterparts.

Not only are my modded wired earbuds as good as a wireless pair, they are even better.

Here’s what I mean:

I have a pair of cheap wireless earbuds from Ali Express. The audio is decent but they suck for immersion.

The problem is, you have to put them in their little case whenever you want to take them out of the ear. Too fussy.

At one point I also had a pair of JBL wireless earbuds, the ones where the two buds are connected with a wire that drapes over the back of your neck. But I hated those too, because the wire always stuck awkwardly to the skin of my neck. Taut, the wire would keep yanking my ear.

(digression: in Serbia, we yank childrens' ears to congratulate their birthdays. Does anyone else do that?)

Anyway, the conclusion is that, for immersion, you can’t beat classic wired earbuds. You can pull them through the inside of your shirt and hang them off the collar. Whenever you need them, they are there.

Their only flaw is that the wires entangle easily. This makes a terrible mess.

So what I did was I made them tangle-free by cutting off the left earbud along with its trailing white dendrite.

I sacrificed stereo, but now I have a single tangle-free wire that runs from my ear down to my pocket where my old school iPod is.

It’s a 3rd generation iPod Nano. The one that looks like a smaller version of the classic iPod, with a color screen and the wheel controls.

When I showed it to my 10-year-old niece she was perplexed by how primitive the technology is.

But looks deceive. The vintage iPod has two key advantages: it’s so small it’s unnoticeable in your pocket + battery lasts all day of continuous playing.

So I loaded it up with some podcasts and audio extracts from TV shows.

Yesterday, I just kept looping the condensed audio extract from S01E02 of the Naked Director, a Netflix show I watched a year or two ago.

I figured I’d keep listening to the same thing over and over again.

Then I might watch the episode and do some sentence mining.

Either way, the earbud just hangs off my collar and I pop it in during convenient pockets of free time.

An extra benefit of this is that I’m now looking forward to pockets of downtime, which actually makes me more useful around the house. Throwing out the trash, vacuuming, emptying the dishwasher, those are now all immersion opportunities.

Let’s see how long this enthusiasm will hold me.

My wife estimates three days tops.

It’s important to have support from your loved ones :D

Just kidding, she’s cool. She’d just seen my previous attempts fail. But last time I attempted to maintain immersion I had the wireless earbuds and my audio was playing from my smartphone. So each time I’d need to pull out the earbud case from my pocket, put one in my ear, then unlock my phone and…. Unsustainable.

Before that, many many years ago when wireless earbuds were not even a possibility, my immersion attempts failed for another reason: I was just too interested in listening to my favorite music which tended to be non-Japanese. And keeping up with new music was important to me, to maintain my status in my social circles :)

But my appetite for music waned, leaving room for a successful bout of immersion for 1000 days.

And besides, last time I didn’t have to account to you, Rine.

Speaking of which:

What I did yesterday

• Covered 100 words from N5 deck
• Listened to audio for a few hours in total
• Imported into SM all the articles from the AJATT table of contents, for some inspiration and motivation. Although I had to assign a relatively low priority making it unlikely I’ll see them anytime soon.

What I will do today

• Do another 100 of the N5 deck. The reviews from the last few days are starting to catch up with me, so I need to put in more time to clear them up before attending to new words. I don’t plan to keep up this kind of schedule. I just want to burn through N5, to get that initial momentum, to reach escape velocity. Afterward, I will abandon chasing daily targets. I will only allow targets in terms of time spent mining, reviewing, listening. Anything else is unsustainable, because it would intrude on my real life schedule and commitments.
• Atomize cards further: Both you and @Rine suggested that if I’m worried by my low retention of word pronunciations, I should create separate cards to test pronunciation, and just test for meaning on the default cards. So today, each time I lapse a pronunciation, I’ll just duplicate the item, apply a different template, and use the duplicate to practice the pronunciation, while marking the parent card passed (as long as I understood the meaning).
• I will try to figure out a sentence mining setup to start doing that next week once I go through the N5 deck. @Raj showed me once how to work with the MPV player and that Anki plugin. But I forgot the instructions. But I think he has a video recording of our call.

Any obstacles

• The changing weather patterns are making me feel drowsy today.

P.S. I actually found three pairs of old school iPhone earbuds in my house yesterday. This eased my wife’s distress. Also, I told her, we can always solder back the amputated pair I’m wearing. Maybe 995 days from now.