I’m hoping to put a few years into studying Japanese, been taking some Duolingo and trying to find other outlets to help me learn. Too everyone who’s fluent in Japanese, how long did it take you? I’m hoping soon to be able to visit Japan and be able to converse with the folks there soon.
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This is a trick question, because if you use Duolingo you will not become fluent.
different people count “fluent” as a different thing
one youtuber took N3 3 times, failed 3 times, and declared himself fluent
others are way post N1, and can speak at length in Japanese on a variety of topics, and say “I’m not fluent”
“fluent” is ill-defined, so common advice is to skim [CEFR levels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Competences) and decide what fits for you. Of course the [JLPT doesn’t use those](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese-Language_Proficiency_Test#Estimated_study_time), so everything ends up being a bit hand-wavey. Call it 1000-5000 hours, depending on your goals.
For actual learning, see the sidebar and try to get to duolingo being a limited thing as soon as possible.
After 10 years studying Japanese, I still don’t know the answer
I sometimes don’t even feel “fluent” in my own native language lol. But I think this question is more about hours rather than years. If you put an hour a year into learning Japanese then you’ll never be fluent because you can’t live forever. If you’re able to devote 10 hours a day to serious study, it might only take you a couple years. It’s also going to depend on your own brain too, how well does it grasp the language? Are you using techniques that work with your learning style?
There’s too many variables to give a firm answer here. Just start learning, find what works for you, and enjoy the journey.
It depends on the time you put in during those years. one man’s “I’ve been studying for 10 years” is another man’s “I’ve been studying for 9 months” Hours are a better gauge than years.
As others have said, it depends on your definition of fluent.
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>I’m hoping soon to be able to visit Japan and be able to converse with the folks there soon.
After a few years of study, you’ll have a pretty decent vocabulary and be able to request things and you’ll be able to get around. You might even understand a Japanese person if they are purposely speaking to you. But if you hear native conversations, you’ll understand nothing.
Think of this in hours instead of years. A few resources would say it takes about 2,200 hours to reach N2 level (depending on what other languages you’re familiar with already). I’d say N2 is around basic fluency, though not fully fluent. So you can think about how many hours you will put in per day to calculate how many years it will take you.
You know, I think it’s better to think of fluency in terms of topics. Like think “I want to be fluent in shopping” or I want to be fluent when talking about my hobbies (and the conversations surrounding that.) If you make a list of areas you want to be fluent in them that gives you two things.. one, it gives you achievable goals. The next is that you can accomplish what matters to you.
Don’t let that distract you from an overall education, but making an anki deck with words you’d use for going to a Konbini and becoming fluent in Konbini could be ultra useful to you. Lol
I’m not sure you should put a time frame on these things, that sounds like a great way to not hit milestones and be disappointed. If you’re doing it for fun, keep doing it for your enjoyment without the expectations. Time maleable and people learn at different rates, any time frame someone gives you may not be right for you.
Also the meme is that Duolingo is a game, not a language learning app, and after maintaining an almost 700 day streak and a year in the diamond league (and throwing it all away) I would tend to agree, every time I could read something I couldn’t before I started to notice it was not something I’d learned from Duolingo.
DuoLingo is good (I use it too) but man, it’s been much better for me to watch videos/do flashcards (vocab, kanji, grammar) and sentence mining. Immersion helps a lot.
Duo really makes you feel like you’re making progress (yay for having a big streak) but I’ve realized it lacks a lot of grammar and vocabulary that would be more worthwhile to study. I can ask if you have black shoes on but I have no idea how to say something like “The black shoes are shinier than the red shoes”.
Also I like to suggest defining limits for your own sanity. I’d like to be able to talk to natives a little when I visit Japan so I don’t feel weird, but I don’t need to know how to read all the kanji I’d see if I were applying for a loan or a driver’s license or something. So perhaps I don’t need to get to N1 or N2 level and that’s okay.
Try doing a search on this subreddit for other materials but here are some good ones
– [Bunpro – grammar/vocab](https://bunpro.jp/)
– Some type of spaced repetition cards (Anki decks, I study a few N5 ones but I’m not sure what decks people here recommend)
– Yomichan/rikaikun Chrome extensions
– [Comprehensible Japanese](https://www.youtube.com/@cijapanese) slow Japanese talking to help comprehension
– [Organic Japanese with Cute Dolly](https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49) I don’t know why this person was being a Vtuber 4+ years ago, and also sounds like their dentures are falling out when they talk, but dammit these lessons are good.
頑張って (がんばって)!!
I’m going on 19 years, mix of self study and formal classes when classes were available, living outside of Japan so mostly reading/listening focused with occasional conversation groups. Daily or close to daily study/language use from about year 2 on, huge variation in total study time per day but probably averaging an hour or two from years 2-6 where most of the action happened?
Ballpark fluency level went about like:
Year 1: Very inconsistent studying, only learned kana and a few basic sentences.
2: Took a class in high school, became able to make simple sentences on simple subjects. Started watching anime without subtitles but it was a massive struggle to understand anything.
3-4: self study, learned the Joyo kanji and became able to follow the overall plot of a manga or easy novel, could watch anime without subtitles but a lot (like a looooot) of pausing to look up words. Speaking skills kind of stalled out without speaking practice.
5-6: College classes, became able to have a conversation (but with a lot of obvious pausing), reading/watching things started feeling more like fun than practice. Took and passed JLPT N1 on the first try in year 6.
7: went to Japan for two months and felt more or less functional, though still with the awkward pauses.
8: Started translating Japanese>English for extra money on the side.
9-16ish: a lot of grad school getting in the way of long daily practice. But by then my general everyday internet browsing was partly in Japanese so I kept using it. Reading speed and comprehension gradually increased and I became able to understand more subjects while listening. Got to a point where if I had a question about an expression there would be a bunch of Japanese people also asking that question online. Started translating scientific abstracts in my field for extra money on the side.
17-19: Recently noticed that I’ve got like…meta language skills. Opinions on different authors’ prose, getting jokes in prewar novels, seeing how anime song lyrics fit in with the show, stuff like that. Finally able to skim while reading. Reading speed starting to look like a regular human instead of a very slow monkey. Still feel awkward talking but I can be awkward on a wide range of subjects now.
So maybe 4-5 years to hit the low end of what people call “fluent” and then add more depending on your definition. I still don’t think I’m, like, native level or anything.
A few years of consistent study will give you a massive leg up if you visit Japan.
Before my first trip to Japan, I took two years of college courses. It was a good school with a good Asian Languages department. The Instructor and TFs were all Japanese and were fantastic.. Class was 1 hour a day, 5 days a week, during all the days of the Fall and Spring semesters. On top of that, I went to a tutor for 2 months during the summer between the two years (instructor-recommended it.. I was grateful for the concern, but sad that I needed it. My grades were fine, but she felt it would help me keep pace with the next years’ material). In the class, we had 2-3 quizzes every week (one being Kanji), tests every other week or so, and probably one writing assignment per month.
After 2 years of that, I went to Japan for two weeks, and was able to have an incredibly stilted and awkward (but still very rewarding) conversation with a pair of friendly ladies I met in the park. I was also able to passably (barely) interact with all the many service/retail people who I had to interact with. I was traveling by myself, so I actually didn’t have a lot of quality conversation immersion. Most of the people who I did hang out with were other tourists. For all intents and purposes, I could not read any kanji, which basically meant I was 100% dependent on English signage.
However, I knew a _lot_ more than people who hadn’t studied Japanese, and I still feel I benefitted a lot from that. Without it, I don’t think I’d have my old-school 朱印帳 (shuinchō; book of seal stamps from temples; apparently I did this before a somewhat recent popularity spike.. when I did it, I was able to watch the temple person write all the kanji and do all the stamping), I wouldn’t have had some of the satisfying interactions that I did have, and I’d probably have incurred an occasional dirty glare, insisting on English everything, rather than the magnanimous responses I near-universally received.
I wouldn’t call myself fluent (my speaking is trash :D), but it took me around 2.5 years to become comfortable enough with writing, listening and reading to not feel that consuming JP content is a pain.
Never, you never stop learning. Not even in your native language that you stop learning.
Reask the question because conversational japanese is fluent to new people
These posts…
3 years not there yet.
Id say 3000 to 4000 hours of immersion
Basically forever
In whatever timeframe you can feasibly fit a consistent 2-4k hours of study/”immersion” without major breaks.
I learned for one month, and I can read manga and light novels in Japanese, with the help of dictionary sometimes. That’s fine for me because I never aim for JLPT or chat with Japanese people. I just want to read untranslated mangas by myself.
We grow up learning our birth language, English in my case, and still don’t know all the words and phrases that come and gone right. Im 33 and there are words used that I have to check to make sure I’m using them correctly or explain the meanings to people. That’s the same way I’ve approached Japanese. I’ve only seriously been studying a few months after off and on bouts of dedication to the subject.
My goal is to be able to ask basic questions and show to correct gratitude and politeness when I finally get to take a trip with my wife.
Wrong question… it’s not about the “how long” it’s about the “how”…
Because it honestly depends on yourself… If you’re willing to put in the effort, you could be speaking pretty fluently in 6 months (give or take).