[jesselt]

I agree with everything that was just posted. You will not be fluent in Japanese after three years of study. You may have an advanced knowledge of the language and could possibly even hold a limited conversation with a native speaker (with plenty of "what does XXX mean?") but you will not be fluent by any means unless you really have no life. By fluent I mean that you should be able to understand a multitude of words that aren't used in every day speech, like "Algebra", "Documentary", etc. Native understanding would require much longer of course. I would say that Nagoyankee has a native understanding of English, so it would be interesting to see how fluent he was in English after three years of study.

I also disagree about Japanese being very easy... Certain aspects of it are easy (reading/writing Hiragana/Katakana is very easy) and others are much more difficult (native pronunciation of certain words and Kanji, and the numerous dialects.)

Some things can also be very hard for English speakers to understand, like descriptor words that seem odd when translated (鼻が高い = tall nose?)

As Kyle said, there are a multitude of other languages that are much easier to learn (for an English speaker, at least) like Spanish.