COOL LANGUAGE THINGS: after a while of speaking the language, grammar becomes less a set of rules that you follow and more a rhythm - a logical pattern to ideas that you start to naturally fall into
you start to pick up grammar rules that you never learned, exactly, just because they begin to sound right and you can hear that they sound right when you say them and everybody understands you without difficulty
you begin to work out grammar problems not by trying to think of the relevant rules but by trying out different phrasings until one sounds right, the way basically all native speakers do it
i still have to think a lot to articulate more complex ideas (mostly expressing exclusion - “everything except this” “only this” etc. are not so much difficult as totally different from English - and perspective on ideas - “that” for something we’re both familiar with and “that” for something only you are familiar with and sometimes “this” for something only I’m familiar with are all expressed in different ways)
but like for the most part i spoke Japanese in perfectly natural conversation all day today with few problems or instances of not being able to articulate an idea or understand something, and I often found myself using grammar that just felt correct rather than consciously thinking about how to phrase something
which idk that’s just hella to me the process of becoming fluent in a language is worth everything else i’m going through this year sometimes