I lived in Japan for a year -- and during that time, I studied at least a couple hours a day, worked amongst mostly Japanese-only speaking co-workers, did two language exchage sessions a week, and regularly hung out with a Japanese crowd. Not to mention, I'm Korean, so my pace for picking up the language was much quicker than most English-only speakers as grammar workings are almost identical between Korean & Japanese, and also and many Korean/Japanese words have the same roots (many kanji-based nouns) & similar pronunciation.
And after all that, I can just barely get thorough text-heavy games. I can just make out the story of children's manga (with furigana). And I can hold a light conversation.
Basically, I was in an immersion environment, studied quite a bit, and had some natural advantages, and I still probably have a good 2-3 more years of that before I'd be considered fluent enough to *natually* play text-heavy games.
Not to discourage you, but be realistic and look at this as a long-term project. I've known exactly two individuals in my entire life that became rather good at Japanese without being in such an immersive environment I described above (These were seriously language-gifted folks). Keep on doing what you're doing -- keep an interest in Japanese language & continue to dig away it. But know that if you really want to get good, you either have to be basically super-devoted, and/or move to Japan for some time.
Topic: I'm learning Japanese. Where do I start? (Read 467 times)
