"Fluent" means "near native." Anything less than that is "conversant." JLPT2 is not fluent in my opinion.
I lived in Japan for a year (and was highly conversant before I went). I returned still not being fluent. I'm JLPT2 for those who care or know what that means.
It is nearly impossible to be fluent in three years. If you're a language savant, then yes. But you cannot build up the requisite level of vocabulary in three years to be fluent.
AJATT will not make you fluent in 2 years. I'm sorry you've been misled to believe that. It is
nearly impossible to learn a language to fluency in two years.
If you found German and French harder than Japanese, then you had terrible teachers or you are a linguistic anomaly. There are so many more cultural similarities, sentence structure, syntax, and cognates between Germanic languages and Romance languages than between English and a linguistic island like Japanese.
And yes, I'm pretty sure that "takes longer to master" means "is harder" for anyone's definition of "harder" but yours, apparently. Compare the writing system of English (26 letters) with Spanish (the same 26 letters plus four (which are basically either combinations of others—rr, ll, ch—or ñ) and ´+¨. Compare English with German (English + ß + ¨). Compare English with Japanese (an extra 2,000 characters
minimum). How is Japanese easier to write than German or Spanish again?
As for why I cite to US government organizations, I do so because
they are more credible than your opinion. I mean, for one thing, they performed research. Research beats anecdotal evidence any day of the week.
As for your absolutely bewildering implication that Chinese writing is not hard to master...I'm not even sure what to make of that.
Next, there is a huge difference between being naturally gifted with languages and actually speaking a specific language well. It is beyond question that I can pick up languages faster than the average human. I say this not to brag, but merely to make a point. Just because I pick up languages quickly doesn't mean that I'm not going to make an error in Japanese. I make errors in my native language. That doesn't mean I'm not good at learning languages!
Finally, conflating the "high" in "hold your head high" and 鼻が高い means you don't seem to know that "pride" has two meanings. One is self-assurance and the other is self-aggrandizement. "Hold your head high" means to have self-assurance (pride). 鼻が高い is a reference to having a self-aggrandizing feeling about oneself (again, pride). Two different meanings of "pride," however.
define
ride - Google Search
Edit: Response to chryuop: You may not hear good Italian or Spanish coming from Americans, but that doesn't mean the languages are necessarily harder than anything else. It just means that Americans don't learn
any second language sufficiently. Come on! Do you hear good Chinese or Russian from the average American that makes those languages seem easier than Spanish, etc.? And even if that didn't bear out, you can still explain it away by the fact that Spanish is basically the default language for Americans to learn in high school and college. It is often picked because they have to as opposed to because they want to. Because the language is forced upon many, they slack off and don't learn the language well.
On the other hand, those who speak Japanese might actually, on average in the US, speak it better than the average Spanish-as-a-second-language American would speak Spanish simply because those who study Japanese tend to do so because they want to as opposed to because they have to.
Furthermore, it's almost impossible to have a kid learn a second language before they're well past the critical period for language learning. Couple that with the facts that (1) English is one of the de facto languages of the world and (2) the USA is so huge means that there is relatively no incentive for Americans to learn a second language since we rarely venture outside our own borders.
And sure, you can find idiomatic expressions in any language that are not immediately obvious to a non-native. You point out that almost no English speaker would understand the idiomatic meaning of "tener que ir." However, no English speaker would understand "tener," "que," or "ir" without studying the language first!
And if you want to start talking difficulty, look at English prepositions. They are numerous, and in my opinion are the hardest part about learning/teaching English.
But all that is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that,
for an English speaker, learning French or Spanish is easier based on almost any metric than learning Japanese. I make no claims about who finds English easy, or whether English is easier than another langauge. I'm just saying for English speakers, Japanese is much harder than Romance languages.