I'm guilty of this as well haha. Not saying it in a negative vibe.

I lived in Japan for two years, and even tried to build an over-engineered learning tool (built a short roguelike version of Shortstraw algo to learn Kanji in Unity).

Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there. Normal spoken Japanese is much more casual than textbooks. There is an introverted component to learning to read (drilling kanji, etc). that probably lends to a lot of tech solutions.