@BV I couldn't help but notice what you wrote about stroke order. Frankly speaking, stroke order should have been the among the first three things you should learn when studying how to write in Chinese or Japanese. It's even more basic than basic grammar construction. Once you understand the rules (stuff like "starting from top to bottom" or "you can't put stuff in a box if you close it up before 'filling' it") figuring out a character's stroke order at a glance would be as simple as sleeping and breathing.
Learning that stuff doesn't even take a month unless you have horrible memory or your language teacher happened to forget to explain those basic rules because of how deeply ingrained into how to write the words it is that they don't even think about it anymore.