I get this question a lot.
And the TL;DR is:
this isn’t going to be quick. Japanese is one of the hardest languages out there.
Remember, this is going to be different for everyone. Even if you don’t pick up languages easily, you can get there; it all depends on your persistence. How much time and effort can you and do you want to put into this? You might become conversationally fluent in 2 to 4 years if you study and practice Japanese an hour or more at least 5 times a week.
LONG ANSWER
So, according to the US Department of State Foreign Service Institute (FSI), Japanese is a ‘super hard’ language (Category V out of V).
Why is that? On top of the things you naturally run into while learning any language,
- you’ve got 4 writing systems — one you know, thankfully.
- you’ve got at least 4 hierarchies of speech formality — and you have to be able to know when to use which one.
- you’ve got to rewire the way you make sentences since grammar appears in a different order from English.
- you’ve got native Japanese words, Chinese words and borrowed words from other languages (mostly English but the pronunciation doesn’t sound quite like English AND they don’t mean what they mean in English half the time). Also, let’s not forget the made-up English words.
- you’ve got words that are sounds representing a feeling or action.
- and you’ve got several words that have the same definition but can only be used in very specific situations.
FSI estimates 2200 hours of instruction to reach working fluency, which is . . . twelve years if you study half an hour every day. Urk.
Build Japanese into your daily routine and do both active and passive learning to cut that down some. Say, you up the study time to an hour each day and focus on getting conversationally fluent first. Now, we’re in the range of 2 to 4 years. Much more reasonable.
And I can teach you how to speed that up even more!