Although there are many negative things one can say about the overall online experience today — particularly now we live in the age of a certain proportion of the population being perpetually offended about one thing or another — one of the best things about it for people like me is the fact it's a lot easier to discover new friends.

This may not sound like a big deal to some of you, but as someone who has always struggled with meeting new people and getting to know them (primarily due to, as I discovered last year, the Asperger Syndrome I've apparently been living with my whole life, and the associated social anxiety) it's a vital part of life in the 21st century.

Twitter and other social media platforms are an important part of all this, of course, and probably the primary way people get to know one another nowadays — though Discord is becoming very popular for smaller groups to hang out more "privately". But for me, there's always been something great about getting to know people through gaming.

My wife and I have both played a lot of Final Fantasy XIV over the years. I'm not an active player at the moment, but my wife still plays. We used to both be part of the Giant Bomb Free Company on the Ultros server, but through them we met a small group of close-knit friends from the neighbouring house in the game's housing district. It turned out that the majority of members of this Free Company, the Loose Cannons (or "LoCo" for short) were actually from the UK like us, while the Giant Bomb FC were primarily from the States.

I actually met a number of the Giant Bomb FC on several occasions — most notably a group visit to PAX one year — but with most of them being on the opposite side of the Atlantic this is not something that could happen all that frequently, unfortunately. It was more likely that those of us from LoCo would be able to meet up a little more often.

Or so we thought, anyway; as it transpired, it took two members of LoCo from across the pond coming to visit for us to actually get together and hang out in real life. It finally happened, though; my wife has spend much of her week off hanging out with these chaps, and I battled my own social anxiety to go join them on Saturday.

Meetups with people you know from online can always be a challenge because you never quite know if the people you thought you had a handle on in the online sphere will be the same in reality. Thankfully, in this case, everyone was largely as I expected, and we all had a great time. Even the delightful ball of depression, anxiety and social awkwardness that is me.

Events like this can be pretty powerful, because it reminds you that those people you're playing with, hanging out with, typing messages to and sending anime tiddies to are actually real. It can be easy to forget that sometimes — particularly, unfortunately, if tempers flare — and it's good to remember it.

I'm still painfully awkward and largely terrified of the prospect of meeting people from online. But in my thirty-six years on this Earth, I've only really had one vaguely "bad" experience, and that was back when I was about fifteen — and wasn't even that bad, just slightly awkward. So maybe I should try and do this sort of thing a bit more often…

You may recall over the past few months when I've talked about a couple of language learning services, specifically Duolingo and Memrise. Both are good, but I've been particularly enjoying the additional variety that the latter offers — so much so that I decided to take advantage of a 50% off annual subscription fees offer and sign up for a year of the service's "Pro" offering.

While the service isn't perfect — for some reason the Pro variant of the Japanese course repeats a lot of content and seems very hesitant to actually teach me new words and phrases unless I specifically tell it to — the fact that it provides a number of different ways to learn besides that which is offered with the free account makes daily study sessions much more varied and interesting.

So what does Pro actually offer? Well, let's take a brief look at each component.

Besides the standard "learn new words, review those words, speed review those words" that a free account offers, another few variants on reviewing what you've learned are offered in the form of "Learn with Locals", "Difficult Words" and "Listening Skills".

Learn with Locals is occasionally incorporated into the standard learning/review process in the form of questions that make use of a short video clip of a Japanese person saying a phrase or full sentence. Learn with Locals simply gives you an entire sequence of these questions, tasking you with either transcribing what they say or translating its meaning into English. It's a nice distinction from the dry, careful pronunciation heard elsewhere in the course, and encourages you to be mindful of things like accents and the fact that "real people" speak more quickly or blend words together.

"Difficult Words" is essentially the same as the standard review process, but focuses on the words that you've previously struggled with — either by getting questions wrong, or using the "Show Answer" function to skip that question and remind yourself of what it should actually be. This is a good way to focus specifically on the trickier aspects rather than padding things out with things you're well familiar with.

"Listening Skills" removes most of the reading side of things from the equation altogether in favour of either asking you to translate something you can only hear, not read, or picking the correct audio clip to match the provided meaning. Not having to get hung up on individual characters is a good way of familiarising yourself with how various words and phrases work; because, as an English speaker, Japanese text doesn't look like it has a lot to do with how it sounds, it can be good to focus on one aspect or the other.

There are also two "bot" exercises you can do — Chatbots and Grammarbots. In both instances, these take the form of a virtual text messaging session; in the former, you're generally tasked with providing the correct responses or Japanese words for a real-world context such as asking for directions, while in the latter you're drilled on structures such as using "~か" to turn sentences into questions, or "~せん" to negate verbs. These are good, but there aren't enough of them; there only seem to be one or two of each for the whole course, so you repeat them a lot. And while Memrise is based around securing things in your long-term memory through repetition, you can have a little too much of a good thing!

I've found that Memrise has helped my confidence with Japanese enormously. It throws you into using kanji alongside hiragana and katakana even quicker than Duolingo does, and you might be surprised how quickly you start to recognise and understand the characters. I still don't think I'd feel particularly confident writing kanji with a pen, but I am getting to a point where I can recognise the characters enough to be able to use the Japanese keyboard setting on the computer and pick the right option.

Is Pro worth it? Hmm, I'm not sure. I don't think it's worth its full price, for sure, as the additional content offered over and above the free plan doesn't feel quite fleshed out enough. At 50% off for the year (about $30), I'm happy with what it offers, though, and I fully intend to keep up my daily studies!