How are you studying? How many hours per day/week? I can’t see how anyone could give you helpful, specific advice without knowing more. Try your best, though. Japanese is hard but it’s not so hard that you should have no results after four years. Assuming you’re accurately self-assessing your abilities, you’re almost certainly using inefficient methods. Watching anime with English subtitles is not an effective method for a beginner, for instance. It’s also possible that you’re only putting in a few minutes here and there. Language learning requires repeated regular exposure. An hour once or twice a week really isn’t enough, much less five minutes whenever you feel like it. Aim for half an hour a day at the bare minimum, but more is better. If on average, you only study an hour a week, you’ll never reach proficiency.

The only other possibility I can think of is that you’re only practicing passive comprehension, i.e. listening and reading, but that you struggle to produce full sentences. The only solution to this is practice, as a language is ultimately a skill more than it is a body of knowledge. Find yourself a tutor or language partner who’ll be patient with you and unlock the passive language skills you’ve built up I have the years. If you have internet access, you should be able to manage this—there’s no excuse. Tandem and Italki are good resources, but you can also see what’s available locally. You know grammar, words, and probably some kanji. But each is a skill. Language is broken down into speaking, listening, reading, and writing. You probably only practiced the last two skills and not so much the first two. Japanese culture is called a circle, square and persists in that way stubbornly. It never gets you to the simple facts straight. In English, it will take you just about 30 seconds to explain something, in Japanese, even after half an hour, you never reach the conclusion since you are kept in its cultural detour when you are communicating in Japanese. There are full of rituals and occlusive mobs out there.

It was much easier to be speaking with Japanese people overseas with those who speak in Japanese but with no culture involved. As a language so distinct from most others, Japanese has an air of mystery about it. Though no longer considered a linguistic isolate, Japanese forms a family with only the ryukyuan languages, and its origin remains uncertain. For English speakers at least, it is considered one of the most difficult languages to master. Outside of japan, 2.98 million people in 133 countries are studying the language at 13,639 institutions, according to a 2006 survey by the japan foundation. Contrary to popular belief, linguists agree that spoken Japanese is relatively easy to master compared with other languages, partly because it has only 5 vowels and 13 consonants. On the other hand, English has 12 vowels and 24 consonants. It’s really not so hard to understand Japanese, only to practice daily, work on the basic things, and read it. listen to the audio, watch movies with subtitles and it also helps to understand Japanese easily.