My recent milestone achievement is having finally reached the point where I can understand enough Japanese to enjoy reading/listening to native Japanese media. I had intended to make my way a list of 8000 or so JLPT vocab before moving on to native media, but after almost two months straight of learning around 100 words a day, yesterday I finally snapped and started delving into real Japanese and was pleased to find that I actually enjoyed it. I started playing ルドラの秘宝, an old Squaresoft SNES RPG, and I can fully understand about 80 percent of it, can pick up about 15 percent from context, and the remaining five percent is too small to really bother me. I've also started watching TBS news, and although it's usually too fast for me to understand at first, I know most of the words, so I can usually understand it after a few repeat listens.
I'm glad I spent all that time going through Kanji Odyssey and mining sentences from Yahoo!, as I feel like it enabled me to learn a lot in a short period of time, but at the same time I'm pretty happy to finally be beyond that stuff. Learning Japanese from non-learning materials sure is a lot more fun.