The previous post is here.

Since the last update, I’ve ground to a halt on studying for the JLPT for these reasons:

• part of my close family (who I live with) has gone on holiday as of the time of writing and I’ve had to pick up their slack with cooking, cleaning etc.
• The Amazing Race and the huge anime bottleneck that’s made. TAR is possibly the only thing I care about as much as anime to the point of making it “appointment viewing” – there are 2 US seasons of TAR airing on TV at the moment (seasons 32 and 35 – with 35 being the newest, but 1 week behind) and 1 Australian TAR (season 7 overall)). Season 32 has no legal catch-up method outside of this, so if I don’t want to rely on sketchy uploads, I’ll have to do the ol’ “jump in, wherever you are in the terrestrial broadcast” which I did when I first discovered TAR. That said, US season 35 and Aus. season 7 air on the same day, about half an hour apart on different channels (…while US season 32 is on a sister channel to the one US season 35 is on, on a completely different day), so they’re much easier to catch up on. Additionally, Aus. season 7 is almost done as of the time of writing (I predict it will finish on November 8th or so) but the other two started later. They’ll probably finish around Christmas time, meaning I will need to time manage like crazy if I want to deal with all those Christmas parties at work, JLPT practice and stay on top of everything else.
• working on freelance work (after I finished that contract, I tried to branch out…and then lost all motivation to be a freelancer when I got back a negative review for a preventable problem – the contract also gave me some confidence with the reading aspect of the test, to the point I’ve gone back to working on translations for my Portfolio page of my own volition)

How have you gone on your JLPT goals so far?

• Now we’re approaching November, I’m temporarily halting Shin Kanzen Master unless I have extra time. This is in favour of timed practice tests and old content I’ve saved from my lessons. Aside from the mock test section of each book, I think I have a good 30 or so pages of both left because most days, I have zero motivation to use my Deep Work Brain (usually because I’ve had a shift or two or other tasks that took priority).

How are you studying?

• I’ve been using anime as listening practice these days – for HypMic, it’s kinda unavoidable anyway *sweatdrops while smiling*.
• My Anki usage is a bit better than usual, but still on the low side. I changed my Anki vocab card acquisition from a Habit to a Daily recently (meaning I need to add at least 1 card a day now, instead of clumping a bunch of vocab together as a batch task), so hopefully that gets rid of my endless bookmarks of researched vocab.
• Speaking of vocab acquisition, HypMic manga used to be a way I’d acquire vocab. Currently, one of the manga (FP & M+) has finished, another’s (DH & BAT+) future is uncertain because the magazine stopped publishing (I assume the manga will continue on Magazine Pocket, which is where DH & BAT was serialised) and the final one (BB & MTC+) is on hiatus until late December. I have a bunch of non-HypMic Japanese-language manga as well as my portfolio material from previous purchases though, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
• Another method of vocab acquisition I have is ARB. ARB has been getting pretty technical lately, whether that be an event about basketball, village revitalisation or farming, so I get quite the translation version of a workout from it…It’s intense, keeping on top of all these event stories, but still hella fun. There used to be a Twitter account (back when X was still Twitter) which translated missions from the game (don’t worry, a lot of the translations are duplicates!) and I’ve taken on the duty of translating said missions for my Discord server, on top of conveying the event story after it goes live.
• On a related note, ever since I revealed I did a Japanese translation Master’s to my coworkers recently, one of my coworkers (who has about 3 years of Japanese lessons under his belt) has been bugging me with extremely basic Japanese speaking practice. How basic? He’s been asking me for my phone number (my ace ass makes me think too deeply about whether this is 1) him hitting on me or 2) him genuinely trying to get free Japanese speaking tuition – 1) is just irritating and 2) would be a disservice to paid Japanese tutors everywhere (aside from impostor syndrome, I tried being hired as a Japanese tutor once when a job listing asked for it, but nothing came of it), so last time he tried this, I rolled my eyes at him, but I’ve half a mind to troll him with my landline phone number – which is currently defunct, but I still remember it off by heart – if he ever tries again). I’ve been revising some of the very basics because of this but at this point, my speaking has atrophied because a) it’s not part of the JLPT and b) I don’t like to talk much anyway, regardless of what language we’re talking in/about.

What do you still need to cover?

• It turns out all the sheets I had intended to work on were complete. I just need to find the answers (if I had them) and correct them.
• using the news on demand service for the Japanese news – since the last update, I’ve neglected to use it – note they do have a Spotify “podcast” for certain topics which I did listen to briefly, though
• timed practice, as mentioned earlier
• portfolio translations (the Fairy Ranmaru blog posts and a HypMic magazine article)

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Update: The konbanwa gozaimasu was from a customer (which is how my coworker learnt I learnt Japanese in the first place), not my coworker.