Blog
Notes
Practical guides and what I learn building and refining the apps.
Guides
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How to study for JLPT listening (choukai) by looping the 3 seconds you missed
Grammar and vocabulary keep climbing but JLPT listening stays flat, usually because the audio plays once and you go straight to the answer key. Loop only the seconds you missed, cut differently for each question type, and dictate to find the contractions.
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How to practice Japanese listening and shadowing with YouTube
Hundreds of anime episodes in and still lost without subtitles? Loop 10 seconds of a Japanese YouTube video, drop to 0.5× to hear small っ and long vowels, then shadow it and play your take right after the original.
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How to make a study plan from your exam date
Exam study plans fall apart when you don't know how much today has to cover. Give a Memento folder a target date and it spreads the new cards so you see everything at least once by then, and shows today's load and your exam readiness as numbers.
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How to practice listening with YouTube (without leaning on subtitles)
Captions on, you follow every line. Captions off, it's noise. The YouTube listening routine an English major landed on after years of being stuck — talk shows over movies, loop the 30 seconds you missed, slow to 0.5×, write down what you hear, then shadow it.
Dev notes
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You asked where to start, so I picked 260 videos
New users kept asking where to begin. So I collected videos with human-written captions by language — English, Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish, over 260 and counting. How Dollim's curated list came to be.
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I majored in English and still couldn't follow sitcoms, so I built an app
I majored in English through grad school and still missed half the jokes on Netflix. Analyzing why led me to talk-show looping, and no tool fit the routine — so I built Dollim. The dev story.
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I got tired of relearning the same words, so I built a memory app
Looking up the same word a week later felt like a tax on reading. Anki never stuck, so I built an app where pasted text becomes flashcards and each card returns just before I would forget it. The Memento story.
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I wanted my missed questions back, so I built an app
Once solved, a workbook shows its answers before you can solve it again. I hit that wall studying for an AWS certificate; my wife hit it studying Japanese. Qpeat photographs the page and restores it as a clean question — the dev story.
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I run every day and never knew what to wear, so I built a weather app
A daily runner's real question isn't "should I run" but "what do I wear." An app that scores temperature, rain, air quality, humidity, and wind as one running score — and a character that wears the answer. The RunWeather story.