So i was reading a Japanese Manga today and i found it was just easier to read it and understand it in Japanese than to read it in Japanese and then mentally translate into English. Don't know why i never thought of this before. I guess all this time I've been using English as a crutch. Anyone have a similar Japanese reading experience?

I never did the mental translation thing in the first place. I did sometimes try to make sense of complex sentences by manually parsing them (putting parentheses around clauses, trying to figure out what connects to what, copy/pasting dictionary definitions of all the words into a text editor, etc.) in the beginning, though.

My breakthrough moments:
-When I realized Japanese grammar had a lot in common with Finnish. English is the odd one out! (Sadly, the Finnish resources for Japanese grammar all seem to suck.)
-When I no longer had to constantly look at furigana. Recalling words became a lot easier when I could finally focus on the kanji.
-When I started being able to keep up with the voices in a VN.
-The first time I could (almost) fully understand something (the 読解 section of a N3 practice exam) without any help from a dictionary.

Could add one or two points about getting the basic grammar down, but I'm not sure where they'd go.