[windust]

Spanish native speaker here. I'm still waiting for my ah-ha moment (I'm learning Japanese for the past 4 months at a rate of 4 hours per week), I do hope it arrives. It took me probably 5 years to be fluent in English, and probably 4 more to actually be good enough as to read/write government proposals, abstracts/CFP, and finally co-authoring a published book "Java 7 Recipes"; my accent still lingers (javapubhouse.com if you want to hear it), the Ys, Js all come out with the same sound for me. I did learn French for 5 years, but lost most of it due to not practicing it. Learning French coming from Spanish felt a little weird because there are gender swaps (for the inanimate objects) that do trip you up. Did try to learn German for 5 months just after finishing French, so I ended up sounding like a French speaking German, which my teacher hated (and whom scared me away from the language!)

I noticed that I'm not really going anywhere fast with my Japanese and I think I might be doing it wrong (listen to one hour podcast while running / biking). Some stuff sticks but in general it does seem that my progress is nowhere near what I had when learning the other languages in a more structured format.

[aneisf]

Going off-topic a bit, I highly recommend you peruse the forum over at the Reviewing the Kanji site (koohii.com). Even if you have no interest in the book the site is based around (Heisig's Remembering the Kanji) there are troves of great advice and methods for Japanese self-study to be found there.

[windust]

Neat, will check it out. Yeah, Kanji might be a tall order right now (still working with Hiragana/Katakana first), but found the forums. Kinda nice to find a community of Japanese learners