Benefit to being a self taught learner

My learning over the past few days has been very slow; I think that the reason was fear of starting verb conjugation. Today I finally put my foot down and forced myself to open the textbook and make notes on verb conjugation and, to my happy surprise, it is not as hard as it looks. Admittedly, I did have to refer back to the book on several occasions while doing a worksheet, but now I think that I'm fairly confident at forming Dictionary, Present Affirmative and Present Negative verbs. The most difficult thing with verbs is learning which ones are ~u verbs, ~ru verbs, or irregular verbs (darn you irregular verbs with your awkwardness!!!). I am a slow learner but once I understand something completely I tend to pick it up well and remember the information, this is one of the benefits to being a self taught learner of Japanese. At school everyone is expected to follow the same pace, but since I am teaching myself, I can take as long as I need to fully understand what the book is trying to convey to me. Today, in total, I did around 1 hour and 30 minutes of active study and around 4-5 hours passive by having a bit of Japanese horror movie + Ghibli marathon (The Grudge, The Grudge 2 and Spirited Away). I am going to try and increase my active studying now, perhaps do an extra hour tomorrow learning Kanji and 5 new particles.