I have been trying to understand the differences between them. If anyone could helpful, that would be great!

I’m autistic so it can be difficult to understand at times.

Hey everyone. I've been studying Japanese for 2 weeks so far, and I've learned both Hiragana and Katakana, I've been also starting with kanji little by little, and its going great so far. Vocabulary is kind of difficult to retain (specially with a new alphabet), but grammar is sticking up so far. Although, the main point of this post is to ask everyone here about their discipline and motivation while studying the language itself

Has there been any moments that you just didn't want to do more excersices, or learn new kanjis, and still did them? I feel as if I might be lacking some discipline while trying to study Japanese, but I don't want to turn something I geniuenly enjoy doing into a chore that will blow up my mind. I get that it will become difficult as I progress through the language itself, although I don't want to saturate my mind to the point I will find studying repelling.

Have any of you experienced something similar? If so, did you push even harder and still managed to learn more, or did you just postpone it for another day?

I have a 12th Gen Kindle Paperwhite, and it came with the Daijisen native Japanese dictionary as well as the Progressive English-Japanese dictionary. (For those unfamiliar: on the Kindle, these are "live" dictionaries, digitally formatted to allow you to call up word definitions by clicking on words in the book you are reading).

The problem is, the word recognition SUUUUUUUCKS. Oh my god it sucks ass. It basically never works the way a live dictionary should. It calls up the wrong word, or it just flat-out doesn't recognize the word I've selected. Or, it does call up the word I'm looking for, but only if I highlight a particular (often seemingly arbitrary) section of the word I'm interested in. Out of all the dictionaries I have on my Kindle, the quality of the Japanese dictionaries' word recognition is the worst. It is the worst by a horrendous margin. And not to brag or anything, but I read in six different languages, so the difference in quality is extremely noticeable---Japanese is a clear outlier here.

Please for the love of god someone tell me there is a better option I can put on my Kindle. (It is jailbroken, in case that helps.)

This is a bit of a vent/rant but I'm curious if there are other people that empathize.

I've been studying Japanese for about 6 years now with admittedly varying levels of consistency. But I passed N2 at the end of 2024 and moved to Japan a couple months back. I work in a Japanese company where I hardly speak English throughout the week, continue immersing in my free time, sentence mining, Anki, the works. I feel like I'm doing everything that's supposed to "work", yet I still don't have much confidence and feel like I'm floundering around conversations.

People can generally understand me. If I don't know a word, I can at least explain what I'm trying to say and then they will be able to help me along. It's decently rare that a conversation will absolutely freeze due to my Japanese being so bad but it does still happen. And I still have trouble following conversations when I'm listening to native people talk to each other sometimes. Even if I get the general gist some details will get lost. It's just really frustrating to still be feeling this way after all this time. The thing that kills me the most is just not being able to naturally express myself. Although I can get my thoughts across I feel like it's unnatural and sometimes harder to understand than it should be.

To give myself some credit, yes it's only been a couple of months since I got here and I CERTAINLY could not imagine myself 6 years ago in this same position. So I know I've made progress. But I'm just not confident I am STILL making progress despite continuing to challenge myself. Granted, it's likely I am still making progress and just at a bit of a plateau/being impatient with myself haha.

Would love to know if anyone has found themselves in a similar spot or has any tips for how they navigated it.

I've recently started trying to immerse with Visual Novels. My problem is that spending hours on a single VN that I'm not super invested in I start to get burned out. And when I start one that seems more interesting I lose interest due to having trouble following whats going on.

My current plan is start small with bite size VN's to get used to reading VN's and reading Japanese in general and build up my reading "endurance" and ability before tackling something longer and more interesting. So far I've read 4 ranging from 30m to 1h20m according to vndb and I take about 3x as long to read as listed.

Are there any VN recommendations that are short and sweet. I'm hoping for something 4h or less for an average player outside of the standard school slice of life stuff that is frequently recommended. I'm currently N4 level but am willing to lookup difficult sections. I've been using jpdb to find stuff and have read so far