Some background information; I went through all of the Essential Grammar section of Tae Kim’s Guide taking notes and making anki cards. After doing all that I still have trouble reading. I run into situations where I know all the words being used but I can’t put them together. Or I won’t recognize something I should know (things like conjugations, conditionals, etc.) Do I need to practice reading and listening as much as I review the content? Or am I just making an excuse to watch anime?
It’s time! 
The more exposure you get, the better you’ll get
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However, subtitled anime doesn’t count
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Thanks for the quick reply.
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Tofugu’s guide to learning Japanese using anime:
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This is just what I needed, thank you very much.
Passive skills alone aren’t enough. You need to actively produce sentences somehow.
And, better than active is Interactive. Get a Japanese friend. HelloTalk / Skype / Line, or something.
And, yeah, you can learn from Animelon and Japanese subtitles.
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what if subtitles are in japanese?
There’s certianly no harm in doing so, but it sounds like your problem lies in a lack of internalizing the grammar rules. You will pick them up naturally, but I also recommend you revise and practice grammar to help with that process!
I want to talk to my native Japanese speaker in Japanese, but I always take 10 painfully awkward seconds to think of a reply… buuuut you’re gonna tell me to push through it… and then I’ll haaave to do it.
Yeah, I was more focused on the words than the information. But now I know a better way to learn grammar.
To dovetail on this, no matter how well you consciously know grammar, it has been studied that language learners acquire concepts in a similar order. This means that constant review of previously studied concepts will keep reinforce what you know consciously until it become automatic knowledge that you can apply.
So to reply to your question: it’s always time to delve as deeply as one can in Japanese. Yes, it’s difficult to do at first because responding takes time, but if you have people willing to bear with you until you get more fluid with your responses, you’re not going to get there without first going through the awkward delayed response stage.
Thank you, this is exactly what I needed to hear.
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