Whoops, meant to post an update like well over a week ago 
. I had a couple pretty big milestones! I finished Minna no Nihongo, then took (and passed) a full length N4 practice test, so I’m considering myself officially having graduated out of the beginner phase!
I also finished 小説 ミラーさん, so I guess I’ve technically finished my first novel in Japanese, though since it’s for learners, it probably only half counts.
I started Tobira, which marks the first book on my Natively profile to have a higher level than the first manga I ever read in Japanese, haha. Tobira is going well so far, but I’m not counting it for this challenge, despite it being fairly reading-heavy.
I finished two Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling translations! The first was for their February 4 show, and then their February 11 (part 2) Korakuen Hall show, which was about as heavy of a workload as the Korakuen shows tend to have.
The day before the Korakuen show, they did TWO press conferences, which I extremely was not able to translate in time, haha. One of them was for Miyu Yamashita announcing that she was going on a three month long excursion in the US after TJPW’s America show next month. I tried to jump on translating that one as soon as I could, fearing that something in the announcement would get machine translated wrong and then more false rumors would make the rounds in the English-speaking wrestling world, but so far things seem to be going alright.
I think Miyu has already gotten contacted for more bookings in America (despite not remembering how to say “please contact me for all bookings” in English and causing TJPW’s ring announcer Sayuri Namba to worry about her ability to survive here, haha), so I’m hoping that everything goes well for her and the trip is a success!
Here’s a photo from the Korakuen show, featuring Miyu Yamashita and Maki Itoh after they won the tag team tournament that TJPW just had:
After the match, Itoh got annoyed at Miyu for calling her her “business partner”, and Miyu said, “Whether we’re business partners or not, now and forever, no matter how many decades or hundreds of years that I live, you are my only partner.” Miyu had tried telling Itoh she loved her, but her public professions of love made Itoh uncomfortable, so she had recently gone too far in the other direction. Maybe she’ll finally figure out the right way to express how she feels about Itoh when they win the tag belts…
Reading in Spanish
So, funny story: I thought the book I was reading was titled Sí, sí es contigo because that is what it says on the amazon page and the kindle file, but I got to the climax of the book, which had the title drop, and it said ”Sí, si es contigo”! I was like, hey, wait a moment, wasn’t it sí and not si? So I googled the book, and I found out that the amazon page is wrong! The title is actually Sí, si es contigo! It’s a small change, but makes for a much better title, I think, haha.
My reading pace picked up a lot as I got further into the book and more invested in the story. I’ve been trying to fix my terrible sleep schedule, but haven’t had a whole lot of luck, haha. One night, I started reading at 5:30am, telling myself that I’d just read a few pages and then go to bed, then ended up reading for TWO MORE HOURS 
… I think that’s the first time this has ever happened to me with a non-English book? So on the one hand, it’s really cool that my Spanish has gotten good enough for a book to pull me in like that! On the other hand… it’s not exactly good for fixing my sleep schedule .
I ended up finishing the book much sooner than I expected, thanks in part to reading like 20% of the whole book that one night. Next, I tried picking up En el jardín de lirios, which is an academic study of GL media. I got through the prologue and am still interested in reading the rest of the book, but I had to do so many vocab lookups, I’m not sure it’s really worth trying to read it now. I’d look up words like “eje temático” and the dictionary would give me “thematic axis”, reminding me that I sure am reading academic theory . I ended up deciding to put it aside until my vocab is better.
I chose to read Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis instead, which was another book I had discovered on recommended lists of LGBTQ Spanish books when researching possible books to add to the library collection. I tried to look for an amazon preview so that I could see if the writing style looked to be at a good level for me, but they only had an audiobook preview. I listened to that and was able to understand a surprising amount, so I figured it was probably a safe purchase.
So far, I think that was a correct assumption! The book uses a lot of more literary words that I don’t know, but I found out the incredible benefit of reading it as a (properly formatted) kindle book is that I can use my kindle’s built-in dictionary to do instant look-ups, which is way quicker than having to look up words manually by typing them out. Currently, this is the most convenient media format I’ve found for reading in Spanish, and I’m really happy with it.
So, in sum, things have been going very well with the challenge so far!