I've been attempting to pick up Japanese for about 15 years now. I've found a general pattern that I can go at it intently for 6-12 months, with about 4-6 hours a day of study. With that, I ultimately get to a point where for each new character or word I learn, I seem to forget a different one. Testing myself with flashcard-like custom software appears to confirm that. Eventually I burn out and cease studying for a year or so, which of course decimates a lot of knowledge and is really horrible to do.

It frustrates me to no end that this is the one thing I've really wanted to try and learn and do and failed at completely. Which is evidenced by why I still haven't given up. I refuse to be beaten, and I'm most certainly going to die trying.

Realizing it's not going to happen, I think it's time to start trying something new. So I'm currently looking into SRS algorithms and nootropics (piracetam et al.) I'll be curious to see if it helps or not.

In my case, the 2000+ characters aren't such a burden. It's the words that can have 500 different meanings (like the verb "kakeru") and the particles that can have 20 different purposes each that really ruin me. I find myself just guessing through all the different meanings and picking the least terrible sounding one, and I learn nothing from that exercise. I know it's all context, but I feel like I can't learn enough to clue into the contexts.

I can 'somewhat' handle the types of multiple-meaning words that are really just one underlying concept that we don't have a single one-to-one translation for. But some of these words just have so many of these that it's impossible to get a 'feel' for their underlying intent. And practically no language learning material out there tries to teach you these underlying meanings at all. They just give you the possible valid translations and leave you to it.