掲示板 Forums - How long does it usually take to learn Japanese fluently?

How long does it usually take to learn Japanese? What I mean is usually I hear that when you’re younger like ages 10 and up, they learn faster than adults. I’m curious on how fast learners learn Japanese or any other language really (rephrased this because this didn’t make sense)

It's highly subjective. Do at your own pace, or cram what you can in a year. But you'd burn out in the latter. Rather, give it a year to learn to spell with hiragana/katakana. Learn some words and kanji along the way. You're gonna be dealing with learning kanji for even longer in your whole education and in life if you keep it up.

And that's not even touching on grammar, where the more sophisticated ones take some time to learn to use and properly convey them. Then you'd have to learn idioms and phrases. A steady pace of that would at least be a couple years, I reckon. I've only just begin the push to seriously learn grammar. I've had at least a few weeks prep with a few particles, but even then, I'm kind of on my 3rd year at this. I'm sure people are ahead of me by now.

There is no such thing as "fluency" in the sense that people think of it, because fluency is, in most conversations, an umbrella term that covers a TON of things.

Fluency more of less refers to your ability to interact with the language in a competent manner. What makes this so difficult to answer, aside from the 1,000 different variables that affect learning, is that we all tend to want something differently out of the language.

For example, "fluency" in reading novels is usually reached faster for many people than conversational fluency. But even these two examples are overly broad. If you say "I want to be able to converse with Japanese people", you have to then think "what kind of people am I talking you? What age group, what medium (IRL, internet, etc.), is this for non serious conversations, business level discussions, etc.?

To give a more specific example, fluency for one person might be "I want to be able to converse with the people I interact with on a trip to Japan next year", and that is very different from "I want to be able to both understand and generate comments in livestreams for vtubers who talk about a highly specialized domain (say, a specific hobby)."

I general "I want to be good at everything with everyone" can take many people decades, although some can get quite a long ways after a few years.

I consider myself fluent in that 99.5% of what I experience in my everyday life makes sense, but you throw me into a novel, and my fluency vanishes. Can I talk to just about anyone for hours on end? Sure, no problem.

So there is usually not a real number that anyone can give out that is going to be *valuable* to others.