What has been your experience learning a new language?

I have been spending the last several years (~4-5) of my life learning Japanese. I spent several of those years in actual formal classes and nowadays study through talking with Japanese individuals and learning new vocab/kanji every day through a website called Wanikani. It certainly takes discipline to do Wanikani literally every day -- I admit that there are plenty of days I don't want to do it, but I do it anyway.

My experience thus far in talking in Japanese has been a double sided coin. On one hand I love being able to use another language other than my native English to communicate. There's something special about that. Yet, I feel like I can't communicate as well and struggle to say what I want to a lot of the times. Continuously learning new vocab has helped but I still feel like I don't really understand a lot of what people are saying. Is there some point at which this feeling goes away? I really hope so. Is it just imposter syndrome?

Relating this back to the ENTJ functions... It seems easy to pick up and use the basics that help get by in daily conversation. Thanks Te! To get better at the more nuanced stuff seems really really difficult and take lots of disciplined, forced practice (aka repeating new words and grammar over and over). I hate repetition usually (Se wants something new!), but since it's necessary here, I just bare with it and try to find the inner reason (Fi) for learning Japanese to help motivate me.

Is there a point though, where this kind of learning stops being efficient and there's another better strategy? I've thought about reading as a way to learn vocab instead of brute forcing it through Wanikani, but every time I try to read, I get super frustrated simply because it takes too long due to my simply lack of initial vocabulary. Maybe there is a tipping point where you know enough words that reading becomes better than brute forcing... What kinds of strategies do you use in language learning?