How Long do you think it takes??
 

How long do you guys think it takes before someone can study Japanese in Japanese?? Like with monolingual dictionaries and stuff like that

I guess it depends on you. For me to be able to do it with English, it took me years. Still now sometimes with a monolingual dictionary I feel not certain and use the English-Italian dictionary.
I noticed though that Japanese in a certaing way is easier. I can already read a Japanese book faster than I could read an English book after the same amount of time of study (lol still 1/2 hours per page ;) ). Kanji help much more than reading all words written in our alphabet. A kanji which suggests the meaning of the word helps much more than hoping to find a word in English which sound like a word in my language.

Yeah I feel that Kanji would help alot, is Italian your first language??

i've been teaching myself for 10 years.
And I still don't feel comfortable enough to post in the Japanese section.

I think my neighbours even heard how hard I laughed at that one.

Theres no way you can be studying for 10 years and not be able to speak!!!!

Lies lies lies.

Yup, born and raised in Italy.

Umm yeahhh ten years and you still can't speak Japanese? Something's wrong bud.

but anyone else??

Although I'm far from fluent - probably a grade four - my current textbooks are written primarily in Japanese, albeit mostly katakana and hiragana with little Kanji. It's taken me about seven months I'd say to get this far. I know about 200 kanji but it's not really enough to study Japanese in Japanese.

Kayci - is it just that you don't feel confident or is it that your ability isn't enough to cope at the level of the other speakers in that section of the forum? I hope it's okay asking, I'm just curious.

I think once you know basic grammar and sentence structure your pretty much set.
Of course if you already have a good vocabulary then that's also a bonus.

For me it was about 4 - 5 months in that I attempted to use Japanese only (I didn't do it much but I tried when I could)
I've been studying now for a total of roughly 7 months.

Computers make the job of studying monolingual a lot easier too.
I have a paper dictionary with furigana in it for kanji that I can't read yet but when i have a computer nearby i don't really use it, just because looking up kanji is faster on a dictionary website.

Basicly whenever you feel comfortable reading Japanese only, you could start to try monolingual study, although it will be difficult to start with.

For example do you feel comfortable reading this:
盗む Dictionary Link
to figure out what the verb 盗む【ぬすむ】 means?

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Now although this wasn't really part of your question i feel as though I should explain why you can start at such an early stage, since even at an early stage of learning it's easy (for me atleast) if you just break it down.

If your not interested in reading my explanation just skip it :p

For example if we take the first entry of 盗む Dictionary Link:
(1)他人の物をひそかに自分のものにする。とる。

I already know the words 物, ひそかに, 自分, する, とる (とる alone makes this verb quite obvious)
I don't know 他人 so I just have to look that up as well, although I do know the kanji 人 so I can take a guess it's going to be to do with a person, and the rest is just basic grammar, の, に etc.

So I'm not training to be a translator or anything so i don't care if my translations are spot on, as long as I understand the true meaning, so my translation based on the basic grammar and words I know would be something like:
(他人)'s thing, secretly, one's own thing. とる = to take
(don't ask me to tranlsate にする here, like i said above, i get it's meaning just dunno how to translate it)

so lets look up 他人:
他人 Dictionary Link

the entry I found easiest was (3)見ず知らずの人。親しくない人。
my shady translation once again was: person of strange. not close person.
So i came to the conclusion it meant stranger/person you don't know.

so basicly: 他人の物をひそかに自分のものにする。とる。 - to secretly take another persons belonging's (in other words steal)

yay! we just looked up a word using a monolingual dictionary and only basic grammar! :p

Of course studying grammar in only Japanese could require more knowelege of the language first but it's still doable I think.

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Sorry for the long post, not all of it was exactly what you asked for but hopefully it will help you understand why i think monolingual learning should be done as early on as possible, or to word it differently, why I think it doesn't take long at all to be able to study monolingual :)

No.
speaking is fine. VERBALLY.
Still can't read or write well. For ten years, and reading and writing at a 2nd/3rd grade level...its sad.