Xelian wrote:I plan to read news articles for the most part.
So if you look at any of Stevi's other videos, he would read an NHK Easy news article a day and "mine it" for sentences which would go in Anki. Sentence cards usually have one unknown element (grammer, kanji, etc.) you want to learn, meaning they're "i+1" sentences. He was pretty meticulous about his documentation, noting number of unknown words and saving all the read articles in evernote (which was handy, because I think he could retroactively search to see if he's ever come across a particular character, somewhat like Lingq I guess?). He then graduated to regular NHK articles. I've also heard FNN news is really good because they release embedded live broadcasts in the article itself, that are very similar and sometimes identical readings of the spoken broadcast.
Xelian wrote:I like fantasy/sci-fi content but I would assume that the vocab in that genre tends to be more obscure, so I think maybe slice of life would be pretty cool and more easy to read.
So I think I lot of people start off with light novels (ライトノベル), which is kind of its own genre. But it bridges the gap (kind of like the Harry Potter of Japanese teens I guess), no need to jump straight into Natsume Soseki.
I have to admit, I have always had the same issue with finding good sci-fi in any language other than English. Other than translations, I can't help you there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If it makes you feel any better though, Khatzumoto from AJATT says, even if it's like 10% Star Trek words, it's still 90% plain vanilla Japanese, so I would say go for it if you find something (as long as it's by native speakers [including translations] for native speakers).
Lastly, this list may or may not help you depending on your interests, but Adam from JapaneseLevelUp was gracious enough to make this difficulty list, including books and dramas at every level!
Xelian wrote:I've seen great J-Dramas too but because of their strict copyright laws they're often harder to get ahold of and if I do it's typically bad quality.
So, you may or may not know about this trick, but if you have a VPN you can set it to a Japan IP address and it gives you TONS more content. A ton of Japanese content it geo-blocked, especially on Netflix. If you do some searching you'll see this is a pretty common, easy, and worthwhile workaround. Language Reactor, Netflix, and a VPN is an extremely lethal language learning combination. Beyond that, you can use tools like Migaku and others to create sentence Anki SRS cards straight from the shows with audio and video if you so please. Great time to be a language learner.
You're already at an extremely high level of Japanese (basically N2), you might be underestimating your abilities. Also, I should clarify, your Japanese is already way more advanced than mine, but I have come to the same conclusions for my other languages. Basically:
Get rid of the training materials as soon as you're comfortably able, read and listen a LOT using materials by native speakers for native speakers, do regular stuff in your target language when you can (e.g. change your computer/phone settings to Japanese), use an SRS so you don't forget stuff/learn stuff faster, and (for a language like Japanese) make a monolingual transition in your SRS cards at an intermediate/advanced level.
Edited: Formatting and clarity. Also forgot another tenet: You have to be having a good time overall, so try to have fun in the language whenever you can.