Typically, I’m quite good at maintaining set goals, as you could see with the resolutions in 2018, which I finished 3 months early. Meanwhile, I kept saying in 2022 I was hoping to get 100 days of anime watched, but I only hit that last week! So much for being an anime fan on main… Also, since I’ve sunk so much into learning Japanese for the JLPT now, I might as well make some goals…

Note these aren’t specifically “JLPT goals” because while the JLPT is the big thing to aim for with this, JLPT N2 is merely a means to an end – these goals are also about patching what went missing during my hiatus and ensuring my future with the language is sustainable.

Complete the Shin Kanzen Master books

I’ve specifically picked the grammar and reading N2 books to buy physically, as these were my weakest sections in the JLPT. My reading book, however, got unexpectedly delayed so (despite the fact reading takes the longest out of the various sections to do) reading will have to be started either a few days from now (as I write this in mid-February) or even in March, which is why I haven’t chosen to go to the July 2023 test.

I want to finish these books with some weeks to spare so I can go through them again closer to the time of the test – I’ve calculated if I go through the grammar book at the pace of about a page or two per day, I should finish with about 8 weeks to spare, while the completion of the reading book will depend on the exact receiving date.

Read difficult content

Strangely, early on when playing HypMic ARB, I found I struggled with reading event stories and parts of the main story involving Mad Trigger Crew because of the sudden difficulty spike in vocab (you just don’t see military or yakuza vocab every day, y’know…?), but that feeling’s lessened over time as more event stories have come out. Arguably, Bad Ass Temple is just as…well, bad…between legal vocab, Buddhist vocab and chuuni complex vocab but 1) I was schooled in legal translation for my Master’s (there’s an entire niche for legal translation that requires human translators, y’know) and 2) I worked through the DH & BAT manga by recapping each section of a chapter in the Discord server and supporting myself with existing drama track translations where possible, so all that is not so bad now. Thus, when I say “difficult content”, I mean “stuff I struggle with reading when faced with a Japanese-only text”, which includes mystery stuff (I mean, I still want to read some Japanese-only Detective Conan content I own…) but doesn’t stop at that.

I also noticed onomatopoeia were a weakness of mine, so to that end, I’ve recently been privately translating the Crunch series and focussing on the onomatopoeia through a combo of the Jaded Network‘s SFX database and standard Google searches. Yoichi (the fanartist who produces these) posts pretty much every day, so there’s something to explain regularly, plus I get to learn about different kinds of food and Yoichi gets my money from me buying their mochi Jakurai anthology last month. It’s a win-win situation.

Sidenote: I keep talking about attacking my weaknesses a lot, especially in this section. That mindset comes from 2 places – 1) “raising the lowest threshold has the ability to raise all the other skills at once” and 2) this Otaku USA article, which has kept me going on this path even when I feel I should throw in the towel.

…that said, the JLPT tests reading and not translation, hence why it’s not “translate difficult content”. I do have some texts I’ve wanted to tackle in a public translation one day like the Animage ones, but they’ll probably see the light in English closer to the test date as a way to both check where I’m at and take a break from the Shin Kanzen Master books. I need to learn to occasionally “turn my brain off” and just enjoy things in Japanese, too.

Sidenote: I have certain manga series which I consume “for fun” – as in, I’ll read it without expecting to put out a translation of it – in English (such as Show-ha Shoten) and in Japanese (such as side DH & BAT+), but even a designated “for fun” series involves extracting whatever vocab I can and slapping them on to Anki cards. (Yes, even the English manga – for example, Witch Watch had a chapter on jeans and I took some vocab from that.) What I mean by the last part above is reading without relying on Anki or dictionaries, which is easily achievable with English but not so much for Japanese.

Conquer my TBR pile

My TBR pile (physical and digital) includes many books and magazines (some in Japanese), so if I’m not occupied by other stuff (e.g. my ever-growing pile of library books…), that’s what I’ll do. I even have a spreadsheet of all the anime/manga (etc.) items I own, bar some additions in recent years…and I’ve fully read about 30% of it, oops. Also, if it’s physical and I decide I don’t want it, I can sell it off.

Besides, now that I’m (hopefully) not going to be locked down any more, I probably won’t need a huge stash of reserved content…right(???)

Go over any content in my old books I haven’t done/wasn’t too solid on

Going through my old textbooks is a source of second-hand embarrassment for sure, but patching these points up will help.

Some years back, I also picked up a PDF of a Japanese grammar dictionary which was optional but really recommended. I started reading it in early September last year – which was when I first started being aware of how little I’d trained for the JLPT, since I threw my effort into my uni stuff instead – and so it should pair well with everything else I’m doing.

Try to get back to consuming the news in Japanese again

At one point, I was watching Japanese news broadcast but this was years ago, so a bunch of it was going over my head (if it hasn’t changed its timeslot since then, it should be on at 11 am on Saturdays). That said, it’s “try” because I might have shifts on Saturday morning now and I might have to patch that over with Japanese-language news articles or Twitter (<- my usual source of Breaking News That May Matter to Me).

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I remember when I was in the JLPT venue and one of the ladies out the front – not a proctor for this test, but one who’d clearly worked as a proctor and/or was hovering around for a later test – told the test takers something to the effect of, “What are you going to do immediately after this test?” I’d read about having a goal like this on Reddit a little, but asking me that, when I was full of nerves to the point of no sleep, meant it was a bit of a surprise that she’d basically read my mind. Two months ago, my answer was to 1) watch the Hypnosis Mic CG concert Hyped Up 02, which had ended up on the same day, and 2) finish the box of craisins and almonds I hadn’t finished during the break.

I bring this (…rather short, in comparison to the rest of this post) anecdote up because of what I mentioned at the start. Sure, reason 2) is a little dumb and I can recall this with enough clarity because it’s only been so long since I sat the test, but it pays to keep things in perspective.