Question ado about fluency...
 

I have a random question pertaining to the fact I'm going to spend a year in Japan in (gasp) 21 days.

I'm currently taking Japanese 1 in school, and I was curious on how fluent you think i'll be by the time I return in January/February.

Some people in my class are skipping Japanese 2 next year by taking it over the summer, and thus taking japanese 3 next year, yet people think i should come back home and just take Japanese 3, which means I would be at the same lvl of the people who took it over a summer compared to a year of complete immersion. in addition to my above question, does this seem right?

Depends on the person and also depends whether you know how to speak Korean or have a Kanji backgorund or not. If you say no to both of the above characteristics, you will probably be able to express 50% what you want to say using short sentences but no where near fluent even if you stay in Japan for 1 year.

If you can speak Korean, you can probably construct more complicated sentences and also speak much more fluently in just 1 year.

If you have a Kanji background, you will have a boat load of vocabulary but grammar wise you will still struggle.

Wow man, a year is long time, your pretty lucky :D I hope you have loads of fun and hope it helps you get a good grasp on the language.

There's no comparison between the Japanese that is taught in American high schools, and the Japanese that is spoken in Japan.

And I must say, I am in love with your signature. Did you shopp it? I've been trying to get that look/emotion/feel in this one sig I've been working on for some time now, but I can't quite grasp it. Yours is stunning.

I think coming back to three is probably a good idea. You will definitely come back with a massive vocabulary and will understand stuff your classmates won't.

The problem is you are comparing a course to real life. You will have holes in the course, grammar you won't understand...or will understand but can't do on your own.

It depends on your age and how much you devote to isolating yourself from your native language.

You can live in Japan and speak almost exclusively English (with a little "supermarket" Japanese) and not starve. But you won't have a lot of fun.

If you stay away from your English-speaking classmates and only speak Japanese, you'll learn it fast. I know someone from Thailand who went to Japanese as a high-school student speaking it very little, and he was in my fifth-semester Japanese course at a university in Tokyo within 6 months.

Join clubs, watch TV, maybe date a Japanese person, study hard, go outside, and you'll learn Japanese quickly. You won't be a native, but you'll speak it well. Especially if you're under 20 years old.