How I can't be sympathetic to people that make excuses

I have a friend who's been living in Japan for the last 2 years. She's the kind of person that complains and is picky about everything. I live with this person and she is one of my 2 room mates. We get along fine; we've never argued or been mad about anything before, but there are things about her that irritates me, but from those irritations I have learned a few things about being successful in life.

She's the kind of person that complains about a lot of things. For example, we had a few conversations on why she can't speak Japanese well and that "Japanese is so hard," which is practically her introduction all the people she meets in Japan. She also complains that her Japanese friends don't speak to her in Japanese (they try speaking in English!) so she isn't getting any practice. In my own eyes, it seems that she is causing her own problems by just complaining about things.

A few nights ago was sort of a therapy session where she needed some sympathy. She told me that Japanese was hard and that after being in Japan for 2 years, her Japanese level hadn't improved to the point where she could speak very well. She accredited the problems to being an English teacher in Japan and the environment she lives and works in is predominantly English.

To try and cheer her up, I've told her that there are many international students (whom are my friends) that come to Japan and become quite good after a year of living in Japan; if those people could do it, so could she. She then promptly mentioned that most these students probably started studying Japanese before coming to Japan, as opposed to her coming to Japan with no Japanese experience. This is true to some extent, but I had to rebuke that there were also a significant number of international students that came to Japan with no Japanese experience whom are learning pretty well.

For every point I made to try and make learning Japanese well a possibility she would come up with some kind of excuse. I would have conversations like:

"Try hanging out with Japanese friends"
"But it's so much work to try and invite them out"

"Try reading Japanese comic books"
"But there's so much kanji"

"Have you tried using that computer dictionary I gave you?"
"I've been so busy to do that"

"These Japanese people keep using informal Japanese that I've never learned in class and I don't understand!"
"How about asking them to explain it to you using simple Japanese? What about writing notes?"

and so on...

She then tells me "that [I] must be pretty tough for any girl to have a relationship with." I knew exactly that she was looking for sympathy from me but wasn't getting any of it.

To be honest, I am quite sympathetic to people that seriously put in an effort but ended up failing. These are the people that you might not usually hear about because they don't end up succeeding in the end, but I have a lot of respect for the work they do to try and succeed in the process. But the irony of it is the people that don't make excuses are the ones that need sympathy the least; they just suck it up and find other ways to try and succeed. The point is that I will be sympathetic if a person does put out a serious effort to tackle some challenges and if the challenge is really tough I will, on occasion, go out of my way to help.

But the problem is, how can you be sympathetic to someone that doesn't step up to a challenge? I am not saying that complaining is bad, complaining helps us identify things for improvement. The problem is not doing anything about it. Success is a frame of mind; a hurdle is something you overcome, not something you stop at.