The weeks become months, and I only very slowly advance down the skill tree in Japanese. It is not even a snail’s pace. I am currently level 12 in Japanese, but this is just a measure of how much work I have put into it, not how much I have actually learned. And even then it is wrong if we compare it to French, for instance. Doing the daily quota of 20 XP in Japanese takes much more time than in French, because it is just much harder.
Even reading Japanese is still difficult. I rarely misread hiragana anymore, but I often have to guess on katakana and kanji. And evidently there is a longer stretch than I thought between understanding the symbols and reading fluently without sounding out the letters at least in my head. Even in Turkish and Swahili, I could pretty much read a sentence out loud even if I had no idea what it meant. In Japanese, I am back to where I was as a toddler, reading letter by letter. Oh well, this too shall pass, one way or another.