I had flirted with manga/anime, but often avoided it because of how superficial many of the plots I found seemed to be, and the characters seemed to express more emotion in their voice than the english translations did, so when I began looking for a language to occupy my spare time with, japanese was one of the bigger ones with genuine application.
After about 1 year of gathering RAW manga and grammar resources, and trying to master grammar/translation, I kind of eased up on my studying and focused on vocabulary/reading. When I returned to translation, it was a lot less of a puzzle for me, and I found that I could understand many of the sentences at first glance, and the rest with the aid of a dictionary.
I'm pretty sure it's been about two and a half years of studying on and off, and I can comprehend all but the most difficult sentence structures, but I still need a dictionary for many kanji and a few words. In terms of spoken japanese, the simpler sentences are easy, but whenever they throw long ones out, I cannot always keep up and I lack a solid spoken verbal vocabulary.