I sound like the devil

Lame weekend, caught a cold Friday and after my meeting in Nagaoka I locked myself in the apartment until Sunday night. Cough, fever, throat, etc., and I'm still stuck on it. I lost my voice in class today and the kids thought I sounded like a monster. It's getting kind of cold out, but not nearly as cold as it will be in a month so I guess I'm not complaining. I haven't used any of my kerosene heaters yet until I get better cuz the fumes will just keep me sick I think.

What I really should have done while I sat around sick was study...a long while back, Debs and Martin talked me into signing up for the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) which is a national certification exam. I signed up for level 3 (though it's above my head) in the hopes that it would motivate me to study. But, as there is no real need for certification and the main thing I care about is conversational Japanese, the studying hasn't gone well. All it's made me realize is that I know no kanji, and my reading skills should be better. In the process, my conversational skills have also dropped because I've been trying to focus on the test-specific stuff I'm weaker at. So all in all it's screwing my Japanese in every aspect by killing my speaking Japanese, and then making me less confident about my abilities in all the other stuff. Problem is, the more I study, the more things there are to forget, and that kills the most important thing, which is confidence.

So, with 2.5 weeks to the test, I have about 250 kanji and 1,000 vocabulary to learn, on top of general reading comprehension. There is no speaking in the test (but there is a listening section, which I expect to ace). I have given up on the reading and kanji, and started to focus on my conversational abilities again...even my Japanese friends have asked me what the heck happened to my ability to communicate with them.