I AM sorry, I was misunderstood.
I forgot to quote. It is not MY (nandemoii's) story, but the blog's AUTHOR's story.
I am not as good as he is ... YET.
http://alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about/
I learned Japanese in 18 months by having fun. In June 2004, at the ripe old age of 21, all post-pubescent and supposedly past my mental/linguistic prime, I started learning Japanese. By September 2005, I had learned enough to read technical material, conduct business correspondence and job interviews in Japanese. By the next month, I landed a job as a software engineer at a large Japanese company in Tokyo (yay!).
I didn’t take classes (except for a high-level “newspaper reading” class…which merely confirmed that classes, um, suck); I didn’t read textbooks and I had never lived in Japan.
So how did I do it? Well, by spending 18-24 hours a day doing something, anything in Japanese (”all Japanese, all the time”). That sounds like a lot of time to invest, but I was almost as busy as you are: a full-time student majoring in computer science at a university in the armpit of the US (Utah), physically far from Japan and Japanese people. I had computer science coursework, jobs and even a non-Japanese “significant other”. In other words, I had a life.
So what? Well, my point is not that I’m better or you or smarter than you. I am not. I am not special—in fact, I have an embarrassing history of making incredibly dumb mistakes that other people just never make. But I achieved some good results and there were reasons for that, namely:
1. The belief that I could become fluent in Japanese
2. Constantly doing fun stuff in Japanese
Either way it was a nice read. I didn't care for how he kept asking for money all over his site, but to each his own.
