The hardest thing in self learning

What is it? What works the best for you? What's something new we need?

I think it's the support from other students. It's quite easy to lose motivation when there's no one kicking your butt and no one to create competition. I think Textfugu worked best for me when I was starting up. I guess it's more relaxed than other websites. And I think we need more real teachers online. People with lots of experience and a good understanding on how to teach Japanese and languages in general.

I've reached the JLPT lv 3 studying by myself( my classmates in a nearby gakkou are still studying for n4, I almost left the school and kept visiting it only to practice conversation with the teachers), all I can say is that a fair ammount of 例文 for each new expression will do. Harder texts or difficult constructions (such as the ones you find in reports , books and journals) will often force me to ask for help from native speakers.

Talking about conversation, I find that there is no other way to improve it but to talk a lot, whenever I have the chance, even alone if necessary, It is quite easy for you to know that "ほうがいい" should come after the past tense of a verb, yet, you are likely to use it the wrong way in a real conversation if you dont allow yourself to learn how to "think in japanese in real time".

Motivation for me used to be no problem, nowadays I tend to get a bit lazy and run away from japanese by playing games or playing guitar, in order to avoid it I changed the language of my favourite ones to japanese too(some of them even have full japanese audio, Rage, Skyrim, Alan Wake and others) so I can keep the practice even if I'm trying to flee.