Hello!
I too am a beginner..although I have taken a path..I think
For me, I never focus on the 'till fluency' time frame, but I aim for a goal(My Leaving Certificate test, and the JLPT) and hopefully I can reach it in time. Aim for the JLPT level you want to take. Forget fluency(unless it's a motivation) and try to get to the level needed for the test.
Immersion is important, when I first listened to Japanese it sounded weird, like someone was just randomly spitting out sounds. Now I can hear each individiual sounds, although not understand a lot. I just listened to music and watched some movies in Japanese. But this is the easiest part.

This website is useful for Heisigs method. Many users have submitted stories and some are really useful compared to the ones heisig gives and past the part where he stops giving us stories.

Learn the Hiragana and Katakana using your own method through anki or try "Remembering the Kana" by Heisig aswell. I've used this, it's okay but not as good as Remembering the Kanji, with the Katakana part lacking the most. Though with it I have literally learnt 'most' or the Kana in 3 hours total time or so.

As for what to do after these thats up to you.
Tae Kim's grammar guide is something a lot have said they have done during RTK or after. It's free too. Google it.

This topic has more beginner things : http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=5322&p=1

Careful about mentioning AJAAT here, controversial. Some agree, some disagree with it, it's a complicated thing. Though if it's motivation I say read it!

I think after RTK I may go with this path : Tae Kim + Kanji Odyssey Level 1 and Level 2, but following the Leaving Certificate(Irish Exam) book as a guide for the test. I may go above the level requested from the test but thats a good side effect

Someone more experienced will have a better opinion on this. Good luck!

Hope this helped!

My suggestions -

1. Don't set unrealistic goals like "fluency" in 18 months or anything like that. If you do set goals make them small and measurable and don't put a timeframe on fluency.

2. Use Tae Kim as a supplement - invest some money into a good quality beginners textbook like genki.

3. Japanesepod101 is great and has hundreds of podcasts discussing the Japanese language. Check that out.

4. Don't freak out if your speaking ability lags way behind your reading and listening ability.

5. Keep an open mind and try to learn as much about Japanese culture as you can.

6. Don't use anki as a learning tool - use it as a reviewing tool.

EasyJapanezy wrote:

I was looking online about the fastest way to learn Japanese and everybody was pointing to different systems and says there it took on average like 5 to 10 years to achieve fluency.

ようこそ！

You can be fluent in 3 years, in 7, or in 12, another person can do it in less than 2, and for some it takes 12 years or more. How long something takes depends on yourself. Learning a language is a big investment in time and effort. Sometimes it can be frustrating, but most times its rewarding, when you begin to understand things said in that language.

My suggestion is, that you should never think of Japanese as being a very difficult language, but another language that can be mastered to a certain degree. Finish RTK asap. Continue to learn the Kana in Heisig style. Learn basic grammar, Tae Kim was suggested, or books like Genki I - II, move on to Kanji Odyssey 2001 or CORE 2000 / 6000. Others favour Core, I can only recommend KO.2001 from personal experience, to build vocabulary. Learn more Grammar with DOB / DOI / DOA Grammar, while reading and listening to native material. Learn the particles and how they function with A Dictionary of Japanese Particles. Then move on to learn for JLPT, read, listen, speak, write, read more, listen more, speak more and you will get there in a couple of years.

You can find some great suggestions for immersion, here, on AJATT, and other places you better discover yourself. Because discovering the language, experiencing what YOU like, or finding something new that you haven't even thought of having an interest in, can be half the fun. Set small goals, reward yourself for reaching them, finish RTK? Buy something you always wanted to. Rewards are not really needed, though, because sometimes reaching a goal can be a reward in itself. Be creative in your methods, walk off the beaten tracks, and find your own way to enjoy and immerse yourself in the language.

The best advice I can personally give you is: DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY ON TEXTBOOKS! Sorry for shouting. But it is a waste to shell out money like crazy, while there are not only great, but also free materials you can learn from. This is a mistake I made, not saying that the books I bought aren't great, oh no! But its simply a waste of money to invest in books beyond the basic, or so called Intermediate stages. Some books are good to have, like the Particle and Dictionary of Basic / Intermediate / Advanced Dictionaries, a Kanji Dictionary can be good investment too. But again, don't waste money on textbooks, only for those really needed.

One last thing, never give up, stay at it. If you need motivation, come here, read some of the old topics, where members are talking about how they were reaching their goals. Or the ones where they have finished something, RTK for instance, which - I must admit, gave me huge boosts of motivation. And if you stay at it long enough, learning Japanese that is, you would wonder what it can turn into, once you are in the clear what you want to do with the language. Or, more importantly, the reason why you are learning the language in the first place, which can go way beyond being a hobby.

頑張れ、EasyJapanezy！

Last edited by Nagareboshi (2011 October 05, 7:58 pm)

My number one piece of advice is don't put off learning actual Japanese just because your doing RtK. Learn some vocabulary that go with the kanji while your at it.

By vocab, I mean this method that I found this way too late through RtK to make good use of it. But it's a little extra effort that can have some big vocab gains. And you won't get keywords mixed up as easily.

(You probably should finish learning kana also, Heisig's kana method also works great, and only takes a week or so of good effort.)

Last edited by Daichi (2011 October 05, 11:39 pm)

Call me lazy but my piece of advice is to browse and search through these here forums. This kind of question is asked a lot and answered by different people so you can find a ton of info here.

I was going to link to some searches but I don't think I can... if you search "beginner"
or "starting" with Search in: Topic subject only selected, you get good results

First and foremost, you could have grown up speaking 10 languages, it would NOT make you better at learning an 11th one. (Unless one of those languages were related to the 11th one.) Speaking a language as a child, and learning it deliberately later on in life are not the same thing. I've been in language classes with many people who already spoke several languages and I've seen time and time again how this is true. So if you are going to contemplate your past linguistic achievements in order to predict whether learning Japanese will be easier or harder for you than it is for others, you can only consider any learning you've done without exposure as a child. In your case, that would be French and German.

However, the information you give about those languages is quite contradictory:

EasyJapanezy wrote:

Also i speak a little french from high school and German because I spent last summer there. [...] Watching cartoons all day and going to school made pick me them all up to an almost completely fluent level within 4 - 6 months.

So do you speak a little bit or are you almost completely fluent? That's not the same thing at all. If you intend to use your past experiences to gauge future ones, you will need to do a more accurate evaluation.

Of course, the meaning of 'fluent' is quite stretchy, but even if you had reached fluency in French or German in 6 months (which is certainly a rare achievement), you would still have to expect Japanese to take 3 or 4 times longer just because it's not a cognate language. You have also indicated that you are now in a university study program, so you won't be as available as you used to be. You also won't be able to go to Japan. In other words, I would expect that you could reach, in Japanese, a similar level as you did in German or French, in about 3 years. However, that probably still wouldn't be what most others here are considering "fluent".

In reality, few people are really motivated, work really hard at it and become relatively fluent within 3 years or so. The 5-year estimate is not a bad one. At the very least, if you shoot for a long term goal, you are no worse off if you reach it earlier, or if you reach a higher level than expected.

Hey everyone,
I’m astounded at all the responses thank you all so much 
So:
raz789 - thanks for the link to the other post I found a lot of really helpful pointers and I really like the way he creates a kind of road map so beginners don't get overwhelmed.
louischa - I totally agree about the pimsleur not having enough levels out, I really wish they would go beyond the basics and really put out a complete guide.
kitakitsume -I already bought the genki I & II and the workbooks and am definitely going to use the taekim website as soon as I finish the RTK. And I’m already a member of Japanesepod101, I really like that website they have so much about Japanese and the Japanese culture.
dtcamero - thank you sooo the music recommendations. I got the school food punishment discography and everything from rip slyme after 2004. I really like both of those and it really helps because so far those and sakanaktion are the only bands I know of that I like and my j-music collection is very small, music is such a big part of my day and this really helps, thanks again and if you know of any other bands please let me know
nagareboshi – thanks for the advice I already got the KO 2001 1&2 and I think I’m a work through that after rtk and kana. And I totally agree about the wasting money early on too much stuff for no reason. I did that with French and now my collection of French books and dvd’s is sitting in storage collecting dust. And I have to say the positive feedback on this forum is really amazing. It makes this whole learning Japanese process a lot more enjoyable 
ta12121 – Really cool progress you’ve made, I’m pretty sure I will do something similar with my studies, meaning use 2 decks in anki for vocab and sentences. I have to say I love anki as a srs, I tried a couple but this one is just awesome, and the pre build deck download option is such a time savers and makes the whole process much more enjoyable  And I really agree the more time and effort is put into it the faster fluency is reached.
daichi – thank you sooo much for that link to japaneselvelup.com I love how he explained the “active learning” time and the “about” wasted time, where reading about Japanese in English feels like I’m studying but I’m really not. It put a lot of things in perspective. And the scale he gave to measure fluency was imho pretty accurate. Plus the deck that he build that he put up for download was just amazing, such a time saver and a great resource to really make sure I’ve got a good grip on kanji without worrying about confusing them with each other  
tzadeck – I really am putting 100% into learning Japanese.
Caivano – thanks for the search terms I’ll look into it 
AlexandreC – Sorry If I was unclear about the languages I’ve learned. In order I speak Albanian fluently, English Fluently both of these I consider m native tongues. I used to speak Fluent Italian and it was my best language up until I was about 12 and moved to the US. I took French in high school and I barely speak two words of it now. I spent this summer in Germany and I can only say basic things like I’m hungry/thirsty, when can we eat, where are we going, what are we doing, asking for directions buying stuff at a supermarket and a few lines of conversation like presenting myself and saying nice to meet you. I don’t know how to read or write it at all.
Japanese is the first language I’m learning because I want to. I really love the language and the culture. I have to say though you are right about how the other languages do not really help. With the others I lived in the place and picking it up kind of just happened. Learning in a non-native environment is completely different and needless to say much more difficult.
The university thing is what going to slow me down the most, especially around midterm and finals season where I basically stop doing everything and study 24/7. I’m hoping that by using anki to study the school stuff and to actually study as the term progresses instead of cramming a few days before will allow me the time to keep up with Japanese even if it means cutting back to 5 new ones a day and reviewing the old ones.
Thora – I have never been able to speak only one language so I don’t know what it feels like to be monolingual. It’s always been at least 2 fluent and working on a third. I’m not aware of any studies but I can speak from experience that language proximity matter A LOT. When I was fluent in Italian I could speak to and understand a Spanish person NO PROBLEM. And learning a little German considering it is the language English originated from was also very easy as there were a lot of similarities. But going from these western languages to Japanese is so different from anything I’ve ever done. Usually the alphabet of the new language was the first thing I learned and then I build vocabulary. But learning how to read kanji and knowing that they are all draw differently and have 2 reading and multiple meanings and they way you read it depends on context is so complicated, I read somewhere that it has the most complicated grammar in the world. But I love it and I totally see myself sticking through with it to the end.  The only thing I can say is that knowing multiple languages only helps as long as they are close to the new one but Japanese is like nothing I’ve studied before so the other languages are more of a hindrance. Like when I’m thinking of how to say something when I’m doing pimsleur sometimes it comes to me on 2 languages neither of which is Japanese so it gets a bit confusing. Though if you do find any studies and they give tips on helping bilinguals learn new languages I’d love to hear them 
The only thing that worries me though is that when I go head deep into a new language the others start to slip slightly. It’s how I lost Italian. So I downloaded a deck in aniki for sat/gre English level vocab and I’ll do that too once in a while to make sure my English stays at a college level, considering I’m majoring in political science/business administration my ability to speak English at a high level is of paramount importance.

So as of right now here is my schedule until new years:
RTK 20 new ones a day and review. About 2-3 hour at night when I have the most free time and am most productive.
Pimsleur Level 1 and most/all of 2 done by New Year’s Eve.
I’ll listen to a podcast I really like/don’t understand because it’s in all Japanese. It’s called Hideradio and it’s from the guy from metal gear solid. They speak clearly and there’s light music playing in the background so it is entertaining. I’ll have this playing when I’m doing passive activities like going to and from school, eating house stuff and what not.

After idk but I’m thinking I’ll go on with KO 2001 lesson 1 & 2 after just to consolidate my kanji knowledge and also use the deck from japaneselevelup.com to make sure I’m clear on all of them so I don’t confuse them with each other. Then probably work through Genki 1&2 since I already bought the books and workbooks.

I’ll probably browse these forums for motivations from time to time, I find the positive vibe everyone brings here is really inspiring 

Thank you so much to everyone for your responses it really helped clear a lot of things up and it helped me develop a clear schedule until new year’s which is what I was looking for.  Plus I got a lot of resources from your recommendations especially about the music  I realize how unimportant and trivial the time frame for fluency is so I’m not worried about that anymore.

Again Thank you 
どうもありがとうございました

Tbh, I would switch KO2001 and Genki - without the grammar background, you're going to have a hard time understanding the KO2001 sentences. They're long and sometimes confusing and convoluted.

I'll admit, I never did RTK - it didn't work for me. I'm currently doing KO2001, some Core 2k, and I do Japanese the Manga Way for grammar. I'll move onto Kanzen 3kyuu for review after and then move up grammar-wise from there.

Anyways. I think before attempting KO2001 you should probably have more of a grammar background...