Luis Urbina Thompson comments

3 to 7 years to learning japanese? It took me the same time to learn English to a high level (my mother tongue is Spanish) and as an English teacher, I can tell you that it's really hard to find someone whose knowledge of the language is over the lower intermediate level.

Is Japanese your second language? That usually happens with second languages, you know, because we're adults and our brains are not as flexible as they used to be and that makes it harder. Unless of course, you're learning a language that belongs to the same family as your native language, say: you know French and you're trying to learn Spanish or Italian, but even so, it's really hard to get rid of the foreign accent or not to make grammatical mistakes every now and then, so it's normal, even the fact that there's always a higher goal to reach: I can completely relate to that in my English learning process.