It's not fun learning any language when the only way you can hear yourself is recording yourself and you have the nerdiest voice in existence :< I'm tempted to just skip speaking Japanese and just learn to read it.

Yeah, that's really all I've wanted to be able to do is read/type it.
But, that's what I like to do with any language.

Luckily Japanese and Finnish spell things the same way, makes it a lot easier for me.
Though because of my bad hearing ability I'm not sure if I can understand others when they're talking in Japanese ;o
Already happens with English, having a pretty hard time following Namasensei at times. But I'm doing rather well I guess.

btw, know all the hiragana now yaaay. ImmortalCow's tip helped me memorize better, I went back on my notes and turned all the romanji to hiragana. Thanks ;o
What's next? There's still grammar stuff and katakana. It'll take a while until I get to the game playing part ;o

It's pretty fun to read kiddy books and sing songs too, good resources to leverage. Yotsubato! has furigana whenever Yotsuba learns a new word, so it's helpful. Reading books with furigana would probably be a great way to increase vocab and learn kanji (you will probably need to learn katakana first though).

While obviously it's not the best teaching method, watching anime does help to a certain extent, perhaps enforcing already learned words or phrases. I'm a near fluent Japanese speaker, but there was a period of about 5 years when I moved to Australia that I spoke zero Japanese, and I had forgotten a large amount of Japanese (to the point that I couldn't read Hiragana anymore).

And then I watched anime and everything was fixed yey


But seriously, just listening to Japanese conversations in general helps a lot. I would watch Japanese talk shows (from my experience, they often spoke slowly and with many pauses, and that helped) to practice my understanding capabilities.

What part of Australia do you live in?

QLD.

I thought japanese was as easy as putting DESU next to every word

That's half the work, you gotta figure out which words to say in the first place desu.

my sister's signature word is desu.i could mean anything.
my sister is full japanese and starting to forget engish....kowaii.