>>361940My next step from Anki grind was reading tweets, lucky for you and me Pekora always do her twitter poems which was a great start for me to get into reading, at first it is going to be rough but stick with it and you'll start to get accustomed to reading and they are also a great source of mining material and understanding them is also fun.
After that I started reading the Nousagi's post-stream impression tweets that they always tweet out on the #ぺこらいぶ tag. This was especially helpful because those tweets are generally more formally written with less slang and every tweet is roughly the same meaning you can get a lot of tweets with the same subject but with slight variations.
Then once you feel even more confident you can start playing a VN or a game or anything in Japanese and continue to practice from there.
The later DQ games all come with furigana as well which is a complete boon in terms of picking out kanji you don't recognize(The earlier ones are hiragana hell, so watch out for those).
And of course like the other anon said, listen to shit, listen to Pekora, listen to podcasts in Japanese and most things you can find to train your listening comprehension. Little by little you are going to grow accustomed to it even if you don't feel it in real-time.
Of course you should never give up on your reps because they are always going to be helpful even if it is a real grind.
