Convince your girlfriend to become a Japanese teacher
Failing that, start dating a Japanese teacher…
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I may not be in a good position to give advice, nor am I a veteran, but I have been actively studying since August. Similarly to you, I invest a lot of time in it, and sometimes I just don’t feel motivated. Just take some time to relax, do things you like, and think long-term. In the end, you’ll reach your objectives, even if it seems like we don’t make any progress or forget basic things - we definitely improve. Personally, I enjoy using video games as a medium to practice; it’s so satisfying to understand basic games, and also basic books!
諦めない！
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I really REALLY appreciate all the support and all the sharing and passion from your posts.
Happy to see so many people never give up and keep going on the path without looking behind.
Today I have learned the hard part still has to come and it will probably never be over in the next years 
I will take all this with a smile and make the small success my biggest reward 
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Everyone already gave you tons of good advice, it’s real nice to see how supportive the community is 
To add my own two cents, what personally helps me is repetitive exposure to the same vocab or grammar. The easiest way to do that is to immerse yourself in the same content several times until you feel like you can understand it.
It can be an episode of a fun anime, podcast, even a movie… I watched Spiderman into the Spiderverse in Japanese 20 times (!), and listened to the same Shirokuma episodes on repeat for dozen of times.
When I play games I prefer those with replayable audio logs, and when I get a hard sentence I replay it over and over until I feel like I can hear it better.
Like other said, what you’re feeling is natural. Don’t be discouraged and keep on keeping on 
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Echoing what everyone said, sounds like you (and me!) are about where we should be at a year’s time.
I just wanted to point something out as someone else who’s also a year in:
You haven’t mastered anything in Bunpro yet (since it takes more than a year. I just realised this because we got the wrap up and I have zero masters 
🫠.) Which means the N5 grammar points will be coming back. You’ve mentioned a few times that you’re considering starting them over. Well, when I noticed that I had 0 masters, I looked back at them and they’re things like です (as mentioned above) and honestly, you probably have seen the vast majority of them a billion times in graded readers and the suggested stories on LingQ (which I also have. Been reading through Who is She and omg why does she care so much??? Sheesh.) I do not think, from the information you’ve provided, you need to go do N5 again. Unless they come back in the SRS in Bunpro and you actually do not remember them, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Edit: Also, about the kids stories. I personally have always refused to read anything that doesn’t have Kanji, because as mentioned before, it’s even more difficult without the extra context kanji provides, imo. So you might be making things more difficult if you’re doing that. There are a lot of things for kids that have kanji, though, like folk tales (love a good 昔話) and of course there are graded readers.
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That Yomichan video looks awesome, going to try to set that all up tomorrow.
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Yeah! Most of the N5 had a good place in my mind, I studied all of them on Genki I with the “Andy course” and it helped me a lot, he spent 7 videos just for one chapter plus homework, and now I can read most the n5 stuff easy on different books. So I was thinking just reading some books like Minna no Nihongo just to go through different sentences. But if I find it tedious I would just stick with my reading 
About kid’s books, I really like them, some short stories with Hiragana I can understand with a bit of effort (Japanese people struggle as well with it because they are not used to it) but there are some nice stories written in kanji like 100万回生きた猫 (very beautiful book) Took me a couple of days to read and understand but it was worth the reading. Is not just about being easy I really enjoy the stories as well tbh.
Every place has its own popular kids’ story, which can tell you a lot about culture and society.
Kids books are underrated 
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This is exactly why I love folk tales so much. Japanese is the only other language I can read them in, but I’ve read all sorts of ones. Plus, it’s interesting to see, in shared stories / translated ones, which subjects or morals are emphasized in which cultures!
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My listening skills are good enough to pass the N1 comfortably, but I watched the latest Godzilla film (without subtitles) and had no idea what they were talking about 75% of the time. Even the new Miyazaki Hayao film was challenging to the point that I couldn’t really understand the meaning of a lot of dialogue, especially the wizard character. I watched Kubi (new Beat Takeshi movie) too, and pretty much everything went completely over my head. Anyway, the point is that N4 is not really the level to be able to understand native materials.
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if you need any help send me a DM anytime or even if you want to find where to get free eroge/VNs. I should be able to help you.
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