How long to learn Japanese?

[Gamer]

How long have you been studying and how much can you understand?

[Hatsumi]

Too long and not enough...lol.

Since I'm half Japanese and live in Hawaii, I've had the fortune of being exposed to a second language from when I was very small. My dad (the Japanese parent) can't really speak more than a few phrases since he was born and raised in Hawaii. When he was a child, my grandparents didn't speak Japanese to him, either, because it was very important for him to be American. That was the thinking back then. Sad, really. When my sisters and I were growing up, however, my grandparents had a very different view. They spoke Japanese around us, although never forced us to speak it back to them. They also made us go to "Japanese School" after school when we were in elementary school. This was an after-school program that was only about an hour a day. I hated it and skipped a lot. It was slow and boring. Even after attending for about 4 years, my Japanese skill was about that of a native Japanese preschooler. My last day of Japanese school was in 1986.

However, the constant exposure to another language, even if I didn't understand all of it, helped me to form those brain synapse connections that are good for learning foreign languages. In high school, I studied 4 years of Russian, then in college, 2 years of German and 2 years of Latin. Finally, in 2003, due much in part to my obsession with video games and anime, I decided to take Japanese again when I tried going back to school for my ICS degree. I was only able to take 3 semesters, but I took the accelerated classes and got to JPN 301.

How much can I understand now? I hell of a lot more than I can speak. In fact, I work with a woman from Japan and she speaks to me pretty much all in Japanese. I can understand her, but I always answer in English. It's been 3 years since JPN 301 and I'm really rusty. When I play games, I like a lot of voice acting because I can understand more than I can read. My knowledge of kanji needs help, hence the game I bought. When there's no voice acting, I hope that there's yomigana (how to read the kanji) written above the character itself. Then I can just use a dictionary for words I don't know. (Using a kanji dictionary is a bit more complicated.) My knowledge of games themselves usually makes it easier for me to understand the mechanics without having to REALLY read every single word. However, I do think that I miss out on story points and such.

Since I'm going back to school this year, it is my intention to go back to Japanese and to take the JLPT. I really want to be able to work somewhere that has connections to Japan.

A lot of the people that were in my Japanese classes had no previous Japanese experience before college. If you have a good teacher and a good program, you can definitely learn to converse fairly quickly. And, of course, if you have the opportunity to immerse yourself in the language itself, that helps. I don't watch anything in English. All the TV I watch is in Japanese, sometimes with subtitles, sometimes without.

Anyway, sorry for the long post!

[Hatsumi]

Oh yeah, I just remembered another helpful thing.

In Hawaii, our public school system has something called the Community School for Adults. You can take classes to earn your GED, learn Feng Shui, self defense, investing, dancing, sewing... You know, that kind of thing. They also teach languages. I'm guessing that depending on where you live, a person might be able to find something like that near them, as well.

[Gamer]

damn those brain synapses!

[suzukifan]

it is quite a bit long, coz many hiraganas, kanjis and katakanas to learn, in a few months at university you learn 100, but you need something like 2000 for reading newspaper, so it needs a lot of practice and patience.
the grammary is very easy, that's the only good point.
It is worth the pain if you want to live there for awhile.