Writing
Tech notes and field-tested insights from building products.
Can't Keep Up When Coworkers Talk Fast? I Turned Meeting Recordings Into My Own AI Japanese Flashcard Notebook
Struggling to keep up with fast-talking coworkers in Japanese meetings is what pushed me to build YomiPlay's "flashcard notebook" feature. This Marine Day essay walks through how I turn meeting recordings and everyday unfamiliar words into themed notebooks, let AI fill in the explanations (or generate a whole notebook from a single prompt), and test myself in several ways to see if it actually stuck.
You Asked for Android — So I Built It. YomiPlay for Android Is Here
After YomiPlay passed a thousand downloads on the App Store, plenty of people kept asking online, "Is there an Android version?" Now there is. This post is both the Android launch note and a full re-introduction to what YomiPlay does — turning audio and video into Japanese study material you can shadow, edit, and revisit.
Dev note: turning any text into something you can hear, read, and shadow — the story behind YomiPlay's Text-to-Speech
Got the text but no audio? YomiPlay's new Text-to-Speech turns any passage into natural narration plus synced subtitles — generated on your phone in seconds, ready for the same close-listening, shadowing, and review as any imported audio.
A Markdown editor that adds furigana to Japanese, made for my daughter — YomiNote
A Chinese-speaking fifth-grader living in Japan can read the kanji but can't always pronounce them. YomiNote was built for exactly that.
Meaning without sound — the "translucent" state of Chinese-background kids learning Japanese
Chinese-background kids learning Japanese often fall into a "translucent" state — meanings come through at a glance, but the readings stay hazy. A narrow gap worth building a tool for.
I built an app called YomiPlay — it turns Japanese audio and video into watchable, shadowable, editable, shareable learning material
Auto-transcribe meeting recordings, podcasts, and YouTube videos into clickable, furigana-aware, editable, exportable subtitles. YomiPlay isn't a player — it's a pipeline that turns a one-time listen into a reusable learning asset.
I built a Chrome extension to make Japanese katakana loanwords easier to read — meet YomiMark
For Chinese-speaking developers reading Japanese tech pages, the real pain isn't kanji — it's katakana loanwords. You can read every character but can't tell the English word in disguise. YomiMark quietly maps them back, fully offline, triggered by text selection.