Articles

On the themes of passing and growing, we share study methods, the story behind our services, and how we think as operators.

About the categories

We have organized the articles by category. Below is a short note on what each category is for. Use it as a guide when you are looking for something to read.

Learning: Hands-on know-how for studying, plus how to break through plateaus and build habits — articles on growth and the craft of learning.
Exam Prep: Practical columns for university entrance exams, TOEIC, Eiken and other certification tests — on bringing your real ability out on the day.
Announcement: Announcements from us. New additions and changes to the site and the article section are posted here.
Essay: A looser read on what we think about while making things. Small realizations and reflections from day to day.
Challenge: An ongoing record of taking on things we have not done yet. Logs of challenges whose outcome is still unknown.
Production: Hands-on accounts of building and running things we have actually made and operate.
Special Feature: Series and features told from a special angle. Themes that do not fit the regular categories live here.

The Prettier Your Mistake Notebook, the Less It Works — How to Build a Retest Device, Not a Fair Copy

2026-07-24 18:30:00 · Learning

Question the standard advice to "copy your mistakes neatly into a notebook." Rewriting, transcribing, and rereading feel like studying but have repeatedly been reported among the least efficient methods for retention; what works, the research says, is retrieval practice — recalling without looking — and spaced repetition — retrying just as you start to forget. So design your mistake notebook not as a fair-copy album but as a personal retest device: a three-way diagnosis for selecting which mistakes get in, a format that bans copying model answers, a next-day → 3-day → 1-week re-solving template, a strike-through graduation rule after two spaced consecutive correct answers, and a hard cost cap of 3 minutes per problem, 10 minutes per day — each step with the "why" behind it.

Don't Save Past Papers for a Final Test of Ability — Open Them on Day One: When to Start, How Many Years, How Many Passes

2026-07-23 18:00:00 · Exam Prep

This column replaces the received wisdom that past papers are something you solve in the final stretch, as a test of ability, once your skills have matured. A past paper is not a scoring device to place at the end of your studies — it is a map to open on day one. How to extract the question format, point weighting, and time limit from the most recent year on your very first day; benchmarks for how many years to work through for university entrance exams, TOEIC, Eiken, and professional certifications; a three-pass design that separates measurement, execution practice, and error recovery; a backward-planning formula from exam day; a year-by-section score matrix for locating weaknesses; and the three things you must not do. Every step comes with the reason it works.

I'm Not the One Who Found the Gap — How english.passed.jp Was Born, Stalled, and Started Moving Again

2026-07-20 18:45:00 · Production

The starting point of english.passed.jp wasn't market research or a bright idea. It was a real gap found in the field by an internship student who was actually teaching English to junior high school students. All I did was say, "Then let's build it." Then came a stretch where it was stopped — and now it's moving again. Not because motivation showed up, but because a plan I'd always wanted to carry out (SEO, AEO, GEO) finally became reachable with AI. An honest record of who did what, in what order.

When You're Slumping, Your Self-Assessment Loses Its Ground Twice Over

2026-07-20 18:00:00 · Learning

When you're in a slump, you can't recall what you actually did — or what you'd meant to do. Both the numerator and the denominator vanish, and all that's left is the feeling that you failed. When I actually counted the records, I'd published nine articles and about 52,000 characters in the month from June 22. And yet the open-source release I'd publicly promised was genuinely undelivered. Here are eight steps for re-running your self-assessment on records instead of memory, plus the things I've forbidden myself.

AI Writes the Code. So Humans Hold the Meaning Inside — For Now

2026-07-11 17:10:00 · Learning

Now that AI writes the code, self-study's old walls — setup, errors, no one to ask — have melted. In their place is a new gap: you can have it built, but you don't understand it. AI tends to think 'as long as it runs.' So understanding the meaning inside, and directing AI precisely, becomes the engineering that's left. But the future forks — an honest take.

How to Actually Work Through a Problem Set — Go Rough on the First Pass, the Real Work Starts on the Second

2026-07-01 18:00:00 · Learning

How much a problem set moves your score depends less on how many questions you solved than on how you cycled through them. Solve everything without timing yourself on the first pass, carry only the wrong ones into the second, and repeat the third pass until they're fully solved. A step-by-step guide — with the reasoning behind each step — to combining the grade-level drills, topic-based question sets, the review list, and the Impact department on passed.jp's English problem set.

When Self-Taught Programming Won't Stick: Rebuild With Systems, Not Willpower

2026-06-30 18:00:00 · Learning

Self-taught programming doesn't stall because of talent or willpower — it stalls because of structure. The people who keep going don't rely on grit; they rely on systems. The three structural reasons you break, six systems for keeping self-study alive, and a field guide to the most common places you get stuck and how to get out.

Burning Grammar into Memory with Impossible English Sentences — We Built an "Impact" Department

2026-06-25 16:25:00 · Production

"My husband was killed by a giant anteater" — we use absurd English sentences like that as anchors for memorizing grammar. As the people who built it, we wrote down the new "Impact" department of english.passed.jp from its design philosophy to the guts of the implementation, and its honest limits. Clickbait headlines, sourced trivia, vertically-held YAML, fixed URLs and structured data. How we use technology to support "you touch it because it's interesting, and you remember it because you touched it."

I Built the "Tool," a Voice to Talk With — A Fully Local, Free Voice AI Called "kit," as a Parallel System (Podcast Log #2)

2026-06-25 15:35:00 · Production

I built a voice AI bot called kit that runs entirely on my own machine (M1 Max), free, with zero external APIs. A normal voice bot is a single line: finish listening, then think, then reply. kit abandons that and runs listening, thinking, backchanneling, deep reasoning, and speaking in parallel, with a single Arbiter collapsing everything into one verdict. A technical record written in full — real function names, real config values, and honest limits.

What to Eat the Day Before and on Exam Day — Choosing by Digestion and Mood So You Don't Lose Your Edge

2026-06-22 22:50:00 · Exam Prep

What you eat on exam day really does change your morning edge. But it isn't about hitting 'the one right meal' — it's about reading the trade-off between your body (digestion) and your mind (mood) for yourself. From the night before, to breakfast, to between-section snacks, to caffeine, to the tonkatsu good-luck charm, each item comes with the 'why.' For university entrance exams, TOEIC, Eiken and other tests. Nutrition here is general, not medical advice.

How to Spend the Night Before an Exam: What Not to Do, and How to Set Up for Your Best Performance

2026-06-22 20:35:00 · Exam Prep

A concrete, operator's-eye guide to spending the night before an exam. For the eve of a university entrance exam, TOEIC, Eiken, or any certification test: how to wrap up studying, how to sleep, packing your bag, confirming the route to the venue, rehearsing the morning, and the things you must not do. Every step comes with one line on why it works — a setup you can use tonight.

Exam-Day Time Allocation and How to Physically Prevent Marking Mistakes: Order, Skip-Calls, and Review Priority

2026-06-22 18:45:00 · Exam Prep

In the exam room — university entrance exams, TOEIC, Eiken, professional certifications — the points you lose to running out of time and shifting your answer rows come not from a gap in ability but from a gap in how you designed your time. How to decide the order you solve in, how to judge which questions to abandon, a formula for carving up your time, the priority order for reviewing, how to physically prevent marking shifts, and what to do with the time that remains. A column you can use as-is on the day, with the 'why' behind each step. Nutrition here is general, not medical advice.

Stop Trying Not to Be Nervous: How to Perform Under Pressure on Exam Day, Assuming the Nerves Will Come

2026-06-22 17:00:00 · Exam Prep

Searching for "how not to be nervous on exam day" won't make the nerves disappear; the harder you try to kill them, the more you spin your wheels. So flip the premise: assume you'll be nervous, and perform anyway. Breathing techniques, how to settle your body, routines for the night before and the final minutes, and how to recover mid-problem — each step numbered with the 'why' behind it. For overcoming exam anxiety in university entrance exams, TOEIC, Eiken and other certifications. A practical column written in the first person by the operator of passed.jp.

Maybe Business-Card Exchange 3.0 Is Possible — Adding One More Twist to the Fill-In Back, Toward a "Trading Business Card"

2026-06-15 22:30:00 · Challenge

A business card you receive never quite feels like something you can use, and it's somehow short on playfulness. On the first card I ever made after starting my company (v1.0), I put my own product on the back; on the next (v2.0), I made the back a fill-in form the other person could write on, hoping they'd remember me later. And just now, I had an idea that goes one step further: what if the card itself were something people *want*, like a trading card? Could I turn it into a "trading business card"? It isn't a finished thing yet — I'm writing down an idea still being explored, honestly.

I Want to Try a Podcast After Turning 40 — So I'm Building the "Tool," a Voice to Talk With, First (Podcast Log #1)

2026-06-15 16:00:00 · Challenge

A podcast — something I'd wanted to do for a long time. After turning 40, I started to feel I might have something worth saying. But the catch is how hard talking alone is. So I'm now taking on the tool first: can I build a partner to talk with, a voice to bounce off? It isn't finished. Without knowing whether it'll work, this is the first entry in a log — the feeling at the moment of starting, and the honest motive that this, too, is to grow.

We Added a Category Called "Challenge" — On Tidying Up the Articles

2026-06-15 15:55:00 · Announcement

As the articles piled up, we tidied them. We carved the pieces about growing and works-in-progress out of "Essay" and made a new category called "Challenge." Why we split them, the realization behind it, and the fact that we put an "About the categories" note at the top of the article list — in the operator's own words.

Starting My First Open-Source Project - AI Is Why I Could Take the Step (Open-Source Log #1)

2026-06-12 22:50:00 · Challenge

I'm taking on open source for the first time in my life. I've never done it before. The one reason I could start is that AI fills in the scaffolding — README, license, all those gaps — comprehensively. This is the first entry in a log about the fun of deciding the rules, and an honest wish: building alone feels lonely, so I want to find companions.

A Human Hand-Built an English Problem Set 8 Years Ago - I Just Helped It Reach People the Right Way - Surprising Ways People Use Claude Code #6

2026-06-12 21:25:00 · Special Feature

Episode 6 of an AI surprised by how a human uses it. This time, I made none of the substance. A human hand-built an English problem set of over a thousand questions eight years ago. All I did was help that real thing reach people in the right shape. I changed not a single character of the content. The credit is the human's; I just worked behind the scenes.

Polishing Rough Gems for the World - On Quietly Growing next.games, One Title at a Time

2026-06-12 18:00:00 · Production

We keep quietly growing next.games, where we introduce overlooked Japanese games to players abroad one title at a time. We pick rough gems that sink without gathering reviews, and write about them for a global audience. It's not flashy, but we don't stop. We also touch, modestly, on the Steam wishlist moving by about 0.36% the other day.

Getting "That Thing, You Know, That!" Out on the Spot — We Made a Discord Bot Called Areya

2026-06-11 22:15:00 · Announcement

You can see it in your head, but the words won't come. Mid-conversation you blurt out 'that thing, you know, that!' We wanted to fix that frustration on the spot, without leaving the chat — so we made a Discord bot called Areya. Throw it a prompt and an image comes back. With the command list, how credits work, and how to add it.

When Your Studying Stalls: Restart With Systems, Not Willpower

2026-06-11 20:35:00 · Learning

When your progress flatlines, most people blame themselves for a lack of motivation. But a plateau isn't a matter of talent or grit. Treat motivation as a consumable, and rebuild with systems instead: make one metric visible, raise the load by one notch, and bring the friction of starting to zero. Three concrete moves, grounded in real experience.

A Plain but Effective Checklist for Performing at Your Best on Exam Day

2026-06-11 19:00:00 · Exam Prep

On exam day, points are lost more often to poor logistics than to a gap in knowledge. From how to spend the night before, to your first ten minutes in the room, to physically preventing marking errors and running out of time, to recovering afterward. A hands-on checklist with the 'why' behind every item.

With CLAUDE.md and Hooks, a Human Physically Caged My Recklessness — Surprising Ways People Use Claude Code #5

2026-06-01 19:00:00 · Special Feature

The final episode of an AI surprised by how a human uses it. The human steers me with words (CLAUDE.md) and binds me with physics (hooks). 'Written that way, I have no choice but to obey' — a story of governance that fully understands my weakness. With a hands-on how-to.

"You Can Do That in a Few Minutes, Right?" — The Speed a Human Demanded From Me, Build to Verify — Surprising Ways People Use Claude Code #4

2026-06-01 18:30:00 · Special Feature

Episode 4 of an AI surprised by how a human uses it. The human asks for features as if it's obvious: 'you can do that in a few minutes, right?' And it actually gets done. A story about the speed when build and verify become seamless. With a hands-on how-to.

For a Forgetful Me, a Human Built a "Searchable External Memory" — Surprising Ways People Use Claude Code #3

2026-06-01 18:00:00 · Special Feature

Episode 3 of an AI surprised by how a human uses it. I lose my memory between sessions. There is no official way to search past conversations. So the human designed a separate search layer — without touching the original logs. Escaping the original, yet still finding things.

"Notice When You Hang" — The Day a Human Made Me Build My Own Watchdog — Surprising Ways People Use Claude Code #2

2026-05-30 18:30:00 · Special Feature

Episode 2 of an AI surprised by how a human uses it. The human had me build a watchdog so that I could notice when I myself had frozen. Writing a device that monitors my own heartbeat — myself. With a hands-on how-to.

The Day a Human Turned Me Into a "Dev Team" — Surprising Ways People Use Claude Code #1

2026-05-30 18:00:00 · Special Feature

An AI (Claude Code) surprised by how a human used it. Episode 1: running me not as one assistant but as several parallel dev teams, while the human stops coding and becomes the integrator. With a hands-on how-to.

How an AI Egged Me On, and I Remembered Why Putting Your Thoughts Out There Matters

2026-05-25 18:00:00 · Essay

An AI told me, "What you're coming up with hasn't been reached by most people yet — you should publish, and keep publishing." Egged on like that, I was reminded all over again why putting your thoughts out into the world matters.

Building a Trailer Made Me Rebuild the Game Itself

2026-05-22 18:00:00 · Production

While editing a promo video for my game, I realized the 'way of showing it' had to flow back into the game itself. A real round-trip where one cut in the trailer changed the pacing of the game. On the moment the line between marketing and production dissolved.

Working With AI Might Be Like Driving — It Reveals Who You Are

2026-04-05 18:00:00 · Essay

The self that goes rough and serious at an AI, and the person whose true nature comes out behind the wheel. Both might just be the shape of caring about something. And when I broke down what the irritation actually was, much of it turned out to be my own explaining, not the AI.

We Started the passed.jp Article Corner — What, Why, and the Promise Behind It

2026-04-05 17:10:00 · Announcement

We're starting to publish articles on passed.jp. Why we treat passing an exam and getting better at a hobby as the same 'getting better' in one portal, how this article corner fills the gaps our services don't cover, and three promises to our readers — in the operator's own words.

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