StringerBell wrote:At this point I've spent close to 2,000 hours reading and listening to Polish and I have almost no idea declension-wise what sounds right. If 2,000 hours isn't enough to start getting a grip on this, it doesn't seem likely that a few hundred hours per year (one hour/day) is going to make an impact in the next decade. It's time to be honest with myself about what I can and can't do. I can't put together even extremely simple 5 year old-level sentences. I miss a ton of words when reading a children's level book even after reading it in English. In fact, I can't comfortably understand children's level stuff without either an English translation or looking up tons of words.
A friend of mine told me once about the son of my Latin/German teacher from studies: "If he knows three words in a language, he can communicate in it". It seems that personality plays a role in language learning. I think you are trying to do an overkill - understand how Polish grammar works and be perfect in that. That is the level that even I didn't reach
I think that you simply are expecting too much from yourself and setting unreachable goals. In the case of simpler language, it doesn't seem to be a problem. To prove my theory you should start learning other complex language and we could see if this is the case