日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 5

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Japanese - Ask questions thread
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1174719097/1-40

日語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread2 質問
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1206158123/1-40

日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 3
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1267485093/1-40

日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 4
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1302350850/1-40

Hey, I'm going to jump right to the point.
I've been studying Japanese on-and-off, from about 2003.
During the 0-10 school year I took actual Japanese courses at my college (Japan 1-summer 9 Japan 2-fall 09 Japan 3 spring 2012). Since then I haven't really practiced much. 
I did import and play Pokemon Black in the fall of 2010, but after a while of carefully translating and looking up every sentence and making sure I understood everything half-way through the game it got tiresome. I started skimming , then button mashing, then not paying attention at all.

Now, I've met a couple of legit Japanese people in some of my current courses, and I'd like to converse with them fluently, but I can barely remember shit.

I want to not only regain what I lost, but continue to improve.
What do?

For Japanese 1-2 I used "Nakama 1", and for Japanese 3 I used the first half of "Genki 2"
I also have "Yookoso!"

>>2 the particle book is quite helpful for looking things up.
Memorizing everything doesn't work very well.
Wikipedia has a pretty decent particle list as well.