Tofugu

I think you may be spot on about the culture clash. Language learning takes a long time, and there are really no short-cuts nor magic solutions that will get you from zero to competent within any reasonable amount of time. This is in stark contrast with programming. If you already know a programming language, you can get reasonably acquainted with your second one by following a really good tutorial in a single afternoon (depending on the languages though).

This make a lot of language learners (including my self) extremely vary and reactive of tutorials and explainers such as these. In the language learning space, tutorials belong as chapters in a good textbook, and explainers belong in dedicated sites written by teachers who have proven their worth with dozens of other explainers (e.g. https://www.tofugu.com/). The difference is that these are meant as part of a much much much longer journey.

[Aside]: Japanese is actually my 5th language and the first that is self taught and outside the language environment. I am also a self taught programmer. I have observed that learning Japanese is in a totally different league then any programming language. I am now two years into learning Japanese, and I can barely read a kids book, and no way can I hold a conversation. At this point in my programming journey I was already writing three programming languages fluently (JavaScript, Python, and R) and was learning the 4th and 5th at the same time (Rust and Julia).

[Re: “this is what got…

> In an editorial published on 4 September 2013, the Los Angeles Times hailed a step forward. “States and schools shouldn’t cling to cursive based on the romantic idea that it’s a tradition, an art form or a basic skill whose disappearance would be a cultural tragedy. Of course, everyone needs to be able to write without computers, but longhand printing generally works fine […] Print is clearer and easier to read than script. For many, it’s easier to write and just about as fast.”

Not all hand writing is meant to just express a point. Some hand writing is also—by itself—an art form. I can easily draw a parallel between penmanship skills and something such as creative writing. An easy to write, and fast way of writing is akin to "Jon kills Joe. Jon marries Susan. The end." Easily written, fast, to the point. And entirely worthless unless you only want to convey the absolute minimum. A fluid style in writing can display nuances, such as which side the gradient leans, what letters have a flourish, or how round the letters are (and which ones aren't).

As a programmer, I need to physically draw and write out how an application and its input/output will all come together. Even something stupid such as a simple box with multiple arrows coming in and out of it can have a big meaning. On paper, it looks like a few lines. But it represents what I actually am thinking about; and putting the pen to paper helps create an extension of my own thoughts, and allows me to move on in my head…

I'm ready to take all the downvotes.

You have lived a very privileged life in Japan, my friend.

I have travelled to Japan and have a fiancee who is Zainichi North Korean.

I urge you to stop interpreting Japanese culture with such extreme rose-coloured glasses and tone down your extreme positivity because it is blinding you from having the "balanced view" you say you have of Japan. Furthermore, it is insulting to minorities in Japan, which has a racist, insular, homogenous culture that so rigidly controls what is "true" and what is "false". The difference is that racism in Japan manifests itself in less violent and direct ways, as the culture of honne and tatemae is so prevalent. So it's difficult for foreigners to distinguish these things at face value.

If you compare types of crimes and the types of "bad things" in the US to Japan, you will see Japan has very little of the "bad" things the US has. That is not the point, however.

For example, I read an article that car accidents are up there as the leading causes of most deaths in the US. The Japanophile will remark how great Japan is because cars are not the leading deaths in Japan. But what the Japanophile will not tell you is that Japan has a high suicide rate, Hokkaido residents have the highest rate of heart disease in the world due to their consumption of sodium, and other issues that are probably specific to Japan.

There are very few robberies in Japan, but sexual harassment and sexual assaults are so common…

I love anime despite all of it's warts and blemishes and worse (as mentioned by others here). And I've been in and out of it heavily since I learned what it was my sophomore/junior year of HS (around 1996/7).

I've learned that for me it comes down to the different way of storytelling and emphasized.

A great breakdown of some of the differences are can be read here.
https://www.tofugu.com/japan/japanese-horror-structure/

especially the diagrams from

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20198301?seq=2

tldr:
"In a Western story the plot is moved forward by the character’s goals."

while in Japanese story telling they might go like this

"In a simple-reaction story, the character’s own actions and the universe’s reactions to them drive the story to a conclusion that may or may not have anything to do with character goals."

and the ending.

"This leads us to the second significant difference between Japanese and Western story grammar: the conclusion. The Japanese story grammar ends with “events and/or emphasis,” whereas the more western model ends with a “resolution.”"

For anyone interested in learning the logical rules that dictate the more confusing parts of Japanese grammar (which were, as others have pointed out, dramatically over-simplified in this article), this is a decent starting point: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kobun-reading-introduction/

I've personally been happy with the following books as well:
Bungo Manual: Selected Reference Materials for Students of Classical Japanese
Classical Japanese Reader and Essential Dictionary
Classical Japanese: A Grammar

Many of the confusing rules we have today (i-adjectives vs na-adjectives, different verb conjugation classes, etc.) are subsets of much larger rule-sets from early in the language's written history. Bound particles are probably the most confusing of these rules, which were too convoluted to survive over time, but still inform common usage patterns today.

The Japanese language (particularly its written form) is very young, so it's actually feasible to gain an in-depth understanding of the language's entire history without spending a decade on a doctorate.

I'll give a couple of these a shot, but I also really have to recommend the spaced repetition Anki provides for drills. There are a lot of community created decks [0] for different aspects of Japanese. And for some reason, creating your own deck for topics or vocabulary really seems to help with memorization.

I can say that after just over three weeks I'm sounding out words. I think hours practiced are a better measure than weeks, but I don't know how many hours I've spent. (Even then sleep seems vital to processing the material, so you can't probably can't just count straight hours you've spent cramming.)

My study has involved using this deck [1]; writing out the hiragana and katakana charts several times; and using Tofugu [2][3] or YouTube for mnemonics, extra explanation, or stroke order.

[0] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=japanese

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/827975112

[2] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/

[3] https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/