Hey, been studying Japanese for 4 years and 1 month ago I took the N1 level.
Someone once told me that the Japanese that you see in anime is the way Japanese people would like to be, and this is a very true statement in my opinion. While anime is a good way to improve your listening ability and pick up a few random words, sentence patterns and the way the speak in anime is pretty different when you compare it to an actual Japanese person.
In anime, characters speak in a direct way, which is totally the opposite to Japanese people, who prefer to basically imply everything. That's where the expression ''空気を読む'' comes from, which translates to ''read the room'. If you try to imitate anime characters, it would be perceived as rude.
With that out of the way, Japanese language is not as hard as people might think, but the shit that's difficult, is really difficult (looking at you, keigo). To be honest the degree of difficulty depends on your ultimate goal with the language: Want to work in Japan? Want to understand anime without subtitles? Want to just be able to have a basic conversation? Depending on your answer, your study focus would be a bit different.
I think most of the students that I talked to agree that kanji is the hardest part (maybe because there are so many) and get anxious when they start learning because they want to be able to write all of them, but I think this is a mistake. Of course it's cool if you do that but I don't think it is worth the effort, you would be better learning to write the most basic ones and then focus on the multiple readings. Don't learn isolated kanji, rather learn kanji with words they may appear in. Also, learn the proper order to write them since it will help you greatly to remember them.
I recommend using https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ to a beginner-to-intermediate level and pair it with a extension called rikaikun, which will help you with kanji reading as you read. Of course, don't forget about the good old jisho.org, though most of the sentences examples are garbage.