From what I remember, the site mostly recommended immersion supplemented by studying methods like spaced repetition, so if that’s like 16 hours of immersion and a couple hours of “study” I think that probably seems about right? Though maybe sleep a bit more.

When I lived in Tokyo I met lots of immigrants that came over with little or no knowledge of Japanese and if they were working in ordinary jobs like in a restaurant or convenience store, they would usually be conversational in a couple months and verbally fluent in a half year. The ones that studied were usually ready to take the N1 after a few years.

People that struggled were usually in jobs like English teaching or programming where most of their day was not in Japanese.

And like I said above, if you want to learn Japanese, the whole point is to use it, so using Japanese for most of the day doesn’t necessarily seem like a burden.

Obviously it’s not for everyone, but that’s true of everything.

Do you think there is another, faster way to fluency?