Ever since the first post, I’ve been planning to do check-in posts for accountability every few months. My reminders are set for the first of each month, but I wanted to make this one earlier because there’s a lot to unpack.

I’ve got these prompts written down for the check-in posts:

• How have you gone on your JLPT goals so far?
• How are you studying?
• What do you still need to cover?

How have you gone on your JLPT goals so far?/How are you studying?

• I fell behind on the daily Shin Kanzen Master schedule I had going in early March and haven’t caught up since. As noted in another post, the reason for this was catching COVID, becoming dissatisfied with my job then throwing my all into job applications.
• I’ve been keeping daily checklists in a private Discord and I’ve implemented a version of task bankruptcy to my list, but that’s much harder to do in Discord and Habitica when you’re worried you’ll lose all your tasks outright.
• Something I’ve been tying myself in knots about, especially due to the post I’m writing right now in response to Rise’s, is writing to Yoichi about getting my English translations of the Crunch series published publically in some form so I don’t feel bad about the moral implications of my translations. I feel like asking to clean up my previous translations for public consumption (<- they were posted to Discord, so they’re full of Discord markdown) is a very big commitment, even though they’re only a fraction of Yoichi’s total output, and in the past, I have broken my word after asking for a thing before – when my motivation ran out with a fanfic years ago – so who’s to say I won’t do it again…?
• Yoichi themself has stopped updating with comics, due to focussing on selling their works, so it should be a good time to strike, but…am I really good enough to do it? Also, should I do typesetting when it’s possible I might never need typesetting skills in a professional context?
• If I do read stuff in Japanese without checking it up, it’s faster but my comprehension slightly loses out at points. That said, it’s hard to identify where these points are without going through the same text at least twice (once without checking up things and once with).
• My TBR pile…I ended up needing it after all! My library focuses on getting all the new books, so there’s always some new temptation there. That said, I did take stock of the books I’ve started which I own, plus I started reading 3 pm no Omochi in mid-March – reading the manga sections was easy enough due to my existing familiarity with Yoichi’s universe and Hypnosis Mic in general, but there’s one prose section called Omochi’s Boot Camp (essentially a HypMic fanfic in book form) that caused me to stall near the end. However, on the day I’m writing this, I did make some progress into the TBR pile because some of the books are due soon.
• I found a folder of content I gathered for JLPT cramming (consisting of mostly grammar sheets) which I’ll have to get around to one of these days.
• The Japanese news broadcast was the first thing I failed on, because I forgot to check when the broadcast was happening when I posted the goals. Turns out it’s now at 11 pm, which works some days but not others because sometimes other people are using the TV at that time (and also because on days with ARB maintenance – which always ends during my shift when I have a night shift – I’ll automatically prioritise ARB). The good thing is there’s news on demand for that program (…which I just found during the research phase for this post, oops) plus a Spotify program from the broadcasting company also spoken in Japanese. In the meantime, I ended up supplanting this goal with listening to Spotify podcasts – aside from dedicated JLPT ones like Let’s Talk in Japanese, I’ve been mostly listening to the Hypnosis Mic After Talk which I mentioned in this post and Spy x Family Operation: Podcast, although I did also revisit Hypnosis Wave briefly when Today’s Crunch mentioned something in it.

What do you still need to cover?

I think I covered most of it already in the first section, but:

• using the news on demand service for the Japanese news
• finishing those sheets (mentioned in the 2nd-last dotpoint in the previous section)
• finishing off the books I’m reading – aside from the bilingual graphic novel Himawari House, which I read not too long ago, everything in the library piles is predominantly in English or was translated to English with only sound effects kept in Japanese, which is why I needed to supplement it with other reading immersion methods
• There’s a poetry competition with a cash prize which could really do things for my reputation as a translator if I entered, but I’ve entered the mid-year period where people shirk their work responsibilities for other workplaces, uni etc., 1) which puts pressure on me as the one picking up their slack, 2) point 1) increases my pressure to get out of my job, plus 3) I have no idea what I’d translate for it if I had the time and emotional bandwidth for it. (That, and the fact I have a weird relationship with my money at the moment, because I have enough to pay off my student debt but no obligation to pay it off – I could save it and get more out of it that way.)
• I noticed I haven’t got a lot of grammar Anki cards and I was meant to consistently make cards of those, but I’ve only been gathering vocabulary from the grammar book. I neglect my Anki a lot because I attack the smallest decks first then get intimidated by the bigger decks.

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I feel like for part of this, talking about things like this proves I know the way forward, and for a small fraction of it (the case of the Today’s Crunch comics, the poetry competition), I’m scared of the results if I do the next steps…