私はアメリカ人で、三年で日本語をべんきょうしました。
In my third year of Japanese language study (a high school class using the Adventures in Japanese textbook, which is basically a piece of shit: there isn't even a glossary in the back, and whenever you need to find a word, it expects you -- I suppose -- to flip through the chapters to find the vocabulary, which are arranged into mostly arbitrary groups. I also don't like the teacher very much, but whatever.) I've lost a lot of enthusiasm for learning the language. In my first year of Japanese, I was pretty enthusiastic. Learning Japanese seemed like a pretty good idea. Yes, I liked anime and manga and Japanese video games, and experiencing those in the original language would be nice, but that wasn't my primary motivation. Languages in general interest me, and I hoped to learn Japanese in order to expand my horizons (as I understand it, Japanese is about as far away as you can get from English, other than the random borrowed words). I think the main reason for my loss of enthusiasm, other than a general exhaustion with school (I'm taking a heavy -- by high school standards, anyway -- courseload this year, with four classes a day, where the average high school student would only take three), but a lot of it, I suspect, comes from a fear of kanji.
Not a literal fear, of course. Each time I see a kanji character I don't scream and close the book/window. But kanji is, as far as I can tell, and as everyone else has told me, the hardest part of Japanese, and the make-or-break part of Japanese learning. The grammar is mostly logical and easy to remember, and the vocabulary is just like any other language, but somewhat easier because spelling is rarely an issue. But I guess I had sort of given up, thinking, "what's the point of learning all this now when I'm not going to take another year of Japanese?" Not planning to take another year of Japanese, I think, was because I didn't want to deal with kanji.