I agree, especially with different accents and slangs. I kinda overcome this partially by exposure (listening to any form of Japanese media everyday - songs, drama cd, yt videos, etc), but its still hard oftentimes.
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Small rules, for example, in english, when you want to type the word “that’s”, you need the apostrophe.
Did anyone say “grammar” in an unqualified sense? Someone mentioned this
Which implies that they do know the grammar. Or even that they “acquired” it. But that does’t mean you know how to say everything in the most natural way possible. Some natural formations are not obvious just from having a solid grasp on all the “glue” grammar.
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Yeah that’s a good thing to do, that’s the area I work on the least right now. xD Between work and Wanikani, Bunpro, Kaniwani, and Anki I usually spend the rest of my free time on YouTube and the YouTubers I like speak English. Even then I barely have time to watch them. 
During Winter vacation I’m going to need to force myself to watch stuff lol.
Well, two of my Anki decks have sentences with audio at least. So does Bunpro, so maybe they’ll help a bit. x.x But it’s not the same as hearing a conversation.
A co-worker of mine told me she’ll let me borrow her full DVD set of Inuyasha that has both Japanese and English subs.
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For me it has to be the concept of a learning curve but for languages it starts out steep and gets easier (before getting hard again but that part is just a guess). I can’t absorb as much knowledge if I don’t have a solid framework of the language in my head already. If you want to be able to pick out new information in a sentence you come across, it helps to know 90% of the sentence to start with and then the new 10% is easy to file away in your brain for future use.
I expect this only works for so far in most languages, there are probably a ton of really difficult things to commit to memory that will take a long time to recognize and master after you have been studying most of the common stuff already.
The hardest aspect of learning a language is using said language, and using it somewhat consistently.
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Don’t know, I might have imagined it or misread or remembered from other threads. My brother is learning italian and was complaining that he couldn’t find an a to z grammar study guide and this was on my mind. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the grammar of my native tongue, or the grammar of english. I don’t really like this “acquire” vs “learn” distinction but I see people trying to basically memorize grammar rules and it bugs me. Grammar is… it’s like… it’s something you practice, not something you learn. It’s not “hard”, it just takes time.
Also, there’s the consideration that what a language book or institute or academy or university tells you is “real grammar” is not necessarily what applies in actual life as “real grammar.” Like how in American English we had that guy from the 1800s or whatever with a stick up his butt who thought English was the same thing as Latin. Because of him, despite the fact that millions of Americans say “me and my wife went to the store,” which by the very nature of being said by native English speakers makes it an acceptable construction in native English, you get armchair grammarians calling everyone out for that stuff and insisting that the way the language is portrayed in books is the “real language” and the “real grammar” instead of the language that people actually speak in their lives.
I’m not very far along in Japanese, but I’m sure similar things happen with Japanese grammar. The omission of particles, for example, is “technically wrong” but that’s a moot point if Japanese people do it in their day-to-day lives.
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The hardest thing for me was having to totally rework my thought process to adapt to a new language structure. Sentences that mean the same thing in English and Japanese may have completely different underlying syntactic structures. It takes a lot of time and exposure for this to really sink in.
I would argue that this actually wouldn’t be a good thing. I feel it’s really important to get multiple perspectives, especially in the beginning stages when you have no knowledge of the language. When you can see things from multiple viewpoints, you can get a much more well-rounded feel for things. This is especially important for things like grammar which are quite abstract concepts that can’t be easily defined in another language. Even with things like kanji which I think Wanikani covers pretty well, I still look for additional sources. One good one is to search for the kanji in a dictionary like Jisho and see what kind of words it’s in. Do they have a general theme? Is it used one way in some words and totally differently in others?
Darn prescriptivists -.-
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I’ve watched it, it was great thanks!
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Ah I just remembered another hard part… The realization that despite studying for a long time, you still have a long way to go. It happens to me when I do watch stuff and try to play games in Japanese. Sometimes it makes it hard to consume media but you gotta just push through it. xD;
And also learning where in casual speech grammar can be flexible.
seconded - being consistent - possibly the most important thing !
As of now it’s the grammar. The basics dont allude me too much, but the conjugations, colloquial language and more advanced aspects are a bit hard to grasp.
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As a book hoarder myselfI see where people get overwhelmed with resources as there is more study material than time but I feel present day has never been better for language learning. Even among WK members, the motivations and goals are fairly diverse so I can’t imagine a singular resource that would address everyone (seems the one’s available today fall short). For me lately, it’s just been a matter aligning my goals and addressing weaknesses and just staying on a path while tweaking as I go.
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For me it’s the construction of a solid vocabulary… It really takes a lot of time to build a deep vocabulary foundation
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Speaking or using what you learned is the hardest for me. I learn all this grammar. I can read or write it on my own but when I have to use it to interact with a human in that language I forget everything even the basics
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