Quote:
Originally Posted by KyleGoetz
What follows is a rambling post for a question I can't really answer. 
It's tough to pinpoint a certain time, but I was at least upper intermediate by the end of year three due to the fact that I had just spent a year at university in Japan.
But I didn't push my kanji knowledge (and closely intertwined vocabulary size) until a few years later, so that delayed my own self-estimation as fluent.
There was probably an eight-year span between beginning formal studies and me being actually willing to call myself "fluent." But probably a third of that time could have been done away with had I sat down and studied kanji and vocab more instead of wasting away in law school. 
One of my professors, right before I moved to Japan, told me "two years in Japan will make you fluent, Goetz-san." Your comfort with the language seems to be where mine was at that point; I haven't any idea about how much grammar you really know, though. Suffice it to say I had spent two years in formal education at that point (and have a natural skill for languages), so 2 years education in the States + working hard + being skilled at learning languages + 2 years living in Japan = "fluent" by a professional's estimation.
Of course, if your standard of fluency is something like "is confident and comfortable having social conversations with people," then I was fluent by year two. My university's Japanese department sponsored a program called 日本語会話サークル that I attended thrice a week for two years. There, I spent at least an hour each meeting speaking straight-up Japanese with natives.
All that being said, my definition of "fluent" is far higher than that. And as a tip for you: until you know 1200+ kanji, you've got no hope of hitting upper intermediate or lower advanced. It's just not going to happen. It's like an English learner aspiring to fluency without learning -ment, -phobia, anti-, -tion, -ization, micro-, etc. |
Thanks! if fluency is determined by knowing 1200+ i still have alot of work to do -_- but its okay cause im working on that now. i think i will go to japan as an exchange student in college now to further my studies. Thanks again for the insightful information this really helped alot