I've been living in Korea for about three and a half years now. I have the language around me, my partner and her daughter speak it at home. But for some reason I am not learning anything from being exposed to it for such a long time.
I tried using apps like Duolingo, Drops, etc. but practically nothing really stuck, perhaps a word here or there. I watched Korean Dramas with English subtitles, but because the order of the words in a Korean sentence is the opposite to English I would never be able to know which word is which.
Two month ago I saw some Korean Teacher advertising 1-1 teaching of Korean so I decided to try it and to pay for help, because I feel I'm really stuck. Now after 2 months she expressed frustration about my progress. She asked me why it's so slow, if it's the first time I'm learning a new language (no, this is my 5th language I'm learning).
It's very frustrating. I feel I invest a lot of the little free time I have into it and it's embarrassing how little I have to show for it. The Korean words are so totally different from the words in my other Languages (Polish, German, Swedish, English) that they more often than not blend together and I remember and hear mostly gibberish.
I always hated learning grammar and vocabulary in every language. And somehow with the other languages I magically got to a level where I would just be exposed to the language and could watch TV and talk to people and would get better at it without much effort.
But Korean proves to be very difficult for me to get to this point. I get that I only will get there with consistency and a lot of grinding, there seems no other way for me.
I feel you, OP. Same here with Japanese. I started out so young and I can read and somewhat write it now but it's incredibly hard to listen to when it's anything more than a few short sentences. I realized that my biggest weakness was vocabulary when reading the news, so I got to that and it seems to have paid off a bit. However, it still feels painfully slow and difficult.