Now that I don't go to office to work, I have freedom with my time. I can work whatever schedule I want. So I'm thinking about enrolling in school and learn something new, might as well a new language, might as well Japanese.
How long does it usually take for a noob to learn conversational Japanese? How about reading and writing?
Well, according to the standards for JLPT, it takes approximately 900 hrs worth of studying to pass lv 1, which is "sufficient for life in Japan", aka you are no longer a noob.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jlpt
Honestly, having some Asian background (specifically Orient) helps a bit, because kanji can be a huge pain in the ass to learn if you never touched this form of moon speak. Even if we throw you into Japan right now, it'll probably still take at least 6 months for you to gain fundamental mastery of the language. (me = Oriental, therefore Kanji => much less painful
)
I see.. well I'm a pure Asian and I live in Asia all my life but I never had, even a little bit experience with Kanji so I guess it will still be hard for me.
I've taken two years of college Japanese, and I'd (probably) be able to get the gist of a Japanese conversation or anime episode, but I would also miss a whole lot. (Then again, so far my classes have been more focused on grammar than vocab, so that's a big part of it.) If level 1 is fluent, I'm probably level 3.
As for kanji ... phew. My sensei is fond of reminding us that Japanese high school students graduate having learned 2001 kanji. Which doesn't seem like that many until you consider that they have different pronunciations and meanings in different words and contexts. But on the bright side, once you learn the basic radicals the harder stuff is a little bit easier to figure out. Just don't figure on reading any novels any time soon *especially if they don't have furigana*
So in short, **basic** spoken Japanese comes about the same rate as most new languages. Reading and writing kanji and speaking proper Japanese takes a lot longer. But be patient ^^ I'm at the point where I can listen to a song or watch an anime ep. raw and catch lots of phrases and words that I know, and that's pretty exciting ^__^
With alot of hard work and hard study, it generally takes about at least a year and a half to learn basic Japanese.