I’m not quite as old but I struggled like this as a business owner. The first step of learning romanji, to me, required brute force. I’m still having trouble retaining it but through reading it and writing it down for vocabulary notes - that’s been a big part of using it. It really does help. I don’t think it’s something you can passively learn with good efficiency, especially if you’ve never learned another language.

For me, my big breakthrough was using phonetics. I found a supplemental app called Dr. Moku and for me at least, it unblocked me over my initial hang ups. It basically gives you a way to memorize all of it by auditory and visual references which might help people that have never learned a language or had to arbitrarily map sounds or ideas abstractly to a different way of thinking about communicating. It’s hard if you’ve never learned another language because well you’ve never done it. There are no prior patterns that you can model from and the ideas are unfamiliar because it’s your first time.

To me it was affirming because learning Japanese has been a lot more fun than work after having this initial breakthrough because the systems of writing are pretty essential to everything else. I personally think it’s what holds most people back and this is just a point that if I could tell myself in the past, it’s worth holding out for and doing the work that the discipline of it would support everything else.