If you’re not able to study for more than a few days in a row, it’s obvious that you don’t *want* to be doing it it, that it’s somehow a “chore”. If you actually wanted to study Japanese you’d be looking forward to each day’s study session and all the new knowledge it brings. You just gotta step back, have a think about why you want to learn Japanese and decide whether it’s worth it. If you think that studying every day is a hassle, then just give up and use your time more productively. If you want this enough though, you’ll stick with it. It’s a little different for me though – Japanese is not the most important thing in my life but I study every day because it’s a damn awesome language and I really enjoy it! :D

I really hope you stick with it, though :) Try this: if you get to a point in your studying for the day where you’re feeling pretty good about it, that it’s interesting or exciting, stop. Leave it for tomorrow. The more you’re enjoying what you’re studying, the more likely you’ll *want* to return to it the next day; you’ll be so excited you’ll not be able to wait! :D Might help you get into a routine more easily.

@Cassandra: In terms of language learning, 1 year is a really short time. If you can’t understand much native material yet, don’t worry; it’s not uncommon :) Find something written in Japanese, like a book, and just take it sentence by sentence. Spend all day on the one sentence if you have to, deconstructing it, looking up the words and grammar you don’t know. Keep learning vocab and grammar separately by all means (that’s exactly what I’m doing), but you can’t just expect to pick up a manga and read it straight off without practice first :) The more you try to read, the better you’ll get (even if you can barely read a line at first).
That’s probably not worded the best.

@larisajane: It’s fun to stay at the YYYYYYYY M C – !!!
Oh wait.

Define “fluency”. Always the biggest hurdle when trying to ask/answer questions like these.

To everyone else who is saying 2 or 3 years: I don’t mean to be buzz kill but that time period doesn’t seem reasonable for anything you could call “fluency”. Definitely do your best and keep studying every day, but I think 2 years is a little lofty a goal. Life gets in the way. It does. Motivation comes and goes. Most importantly though, anything near “fluency” takes a LOT of practice, experience, dedication and immersion; I can’t see anyone fitting enough of all of that in 2 years with ANY language, let alone Japanese.

Sorry to dampen your spirits! XD I just think you should worry less about things far in the future. Make short-term goals. Make mid-term goals. Try to suck a little less each day ;)

皆さん、頑張って一生懸命・勉強して下さい！＾ー＾ – “Keep at it and study hard everyone!”

Oh, and I started Japanese last September, only properly studying since January because of work. My goal for having the language skills to become a normally functioning Japanese adult (if I wanted to) is… roughly… 4/5 more years, longer if I don’t manage to travel to Japan before then (I don’t have the time or willpower to try AJATT’s immersion method just now >.<). Bear in mind when Koichi was writing his Koichi-ben blog in Japanese, he'd been studying for about 8 years already IIRC and was still posting to lang-8 to get natives to check his writing and correct it. Something to think about.

EDIT: Actually, make that 4/5 years (or longer) for “semi-fluency”, whatever *that* is… It’ll take a lot longer to be near the same level as a regular native adult, when you think about it.

• This reply was modified 13 years, 4 months ago by  MisterM2402 [Michael].

@Kaona: missing is right, you’re wasting your time correcting posts and not having others correct your own posts. My first lang-8 post sucked balls, but I still wrote it, I still learned from it. The mistakes I made in my last one are cringe-worthy now, but I learned from them, and you should do the same. JFDI, as is Koichi’s slogan. I mean yeah, it takes time and motivation to write, but you can just use the time you *would* have spent correcting English to work on your Japanese.

missingno15 has said plenty of times that he was going to leave, but they all come craaaaawling back to Estelle! Uh, I mean “TextFugu Forum” ;)

Yeah, my thoughts are that she is not very good at taking advice. Tried to help her with particles she said she needed to learn for a test over the weekend (using hiragana and spaces), but she just completely ignored it all and said “But I haven’t learned ANY katakana yet!!!” (I’d used 2 small words which could have been guessed from context/the translation). Didn’t even say “thanks for your help anyway :)”. It’s sad to see, but she doesn’t strike me as the type to stick with Japanese till the bitter end. She said her teacher made them all learn ha/ga/mo/to/wo/de/etc. by themselves over one weekend, which I thought was a bit odd… Sounds a terrible course in my opinion.

missing’s post has hit the nail on the head I think. Though I’d use the word “blunt” rather than “straightforward” haha ;) Telling it like it is is the best course of action sometimes, and this is one of those times I think.

Get learning your kana then!! I only typed two katakana words, which the meaning, at least, can be guessed from the translation. Take ドア を しめます for example: ドア is written in katakana, but since it comes before the を and the object in the translation is “door”, you should be able to guess it means door! XD Or use a dictionary…

If you are learning more than “wa” and “ga”, then you are obviously not a complete beginner, so I’m not sure why you can’t read what I wrote…? I wrote those sentences how TextFugu writes them! :D