Your Japanese Weak Point
Humans are great at avoiding their weaknesses. It hurts to think about them, and our brains are wired to try and take the easiest route. It’s your perseverance that prevents you from doing what’s easy all the time, though. Because perseverance is a limited resource, you have to pick and choose what you spend it on to have the greatest effect. If you want to get better at Japanese, I hope that you spend it right here:
Contemplate on your Japanese for a few minutes. I want you to pinpoint your greatest weakness. What constantly holds you back? What trips you up? What kinds of things do you have to look up the most? What do you hate studying the most? The longer you’ve studied Japanese, the longer this contemplation will take and the more you’ll have to consider. But in the end, I want you to come up with just one thing. The “worst” thing. If you were to rank your Japanese language weaknesses, this would be #1.
After you figure it out, it’s time to come up with a plan that will turn your weakness into a strength. To do this, you have to drop everything else and focus solely on your weakness.
Think about the great professionals in the world. Baseball players, figure skaters, chess masters, computer programmers, etc. The reason they are great (and not just so-so, like everyone else) is primarily because they focused on their weaknesses. A figure skater isn’t going to spend all their time focusing on what they’re already good at. It’ll make them feel good about themselves, sure. But they won’t get any better that way. Instead, they’re going to work on the spinny jump that gives them the most trouble. The one that causes them to fall the most. If they can improve this one aspect of their skating, their entire routine will improve.
It’s the same for language learning (and everything else, actually!). The easiest example of this is kanji. It is many people’s weak point. Say you’re studying with a textbook, learning some Japanese grammar. You have to read the example sentences, and almost every time you come across a kanji, you have to look it up. Or, every time you come across a word that uses kanji (which is like, ALL THE TIME), you have to look it up.
more..http://www.tofugu.com/videos/your-japanese-weak-point/
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I love his articles on tofugu and his work on Textfugu and Wanikani (and another one to be released soon to replace textfugu). Anyone interested in learning at a leisurely pace, I recommend those (but it's not free, for that go to Tae Kim!).
My weakness is simple: I am entirely too self-concious to actually attempt to write or speak. I don't know when I acquired that, but it was after high school sometime. 
I'm working up the nerve to do Lang8 though (as Koichi suggests, even), so it's a start.