On a trans-Pacific flight to Narita several months ago, I struck up a conversation with a passenger who was upbeat about living in Japan. After six months, he told me with a self-satisfied grin, he had "just about got all the hiragana down pat."
"What's taking him so long?" I grumbled (to myself) in mild annoyance. At the risk of being branded a crotchety old man, my university term began with 45 minutes of dictation drills in hiragana every morning, and we were expected to be able to write out all the characters by the end of our first week in class.
My point is that while some types of knowledge can be acquired through osmosis, language study at its initial stages calls for intensive efforts, and a lack of pressure usually produces haphazard results.