I think in general people should spend less time thinking about what fluency means and how fluent they are and more time studying.
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Oh, man, great job @Devenu! I came in here to provide exactly the same information you did and you did it a lot better than I would have. I’ll just add a couple of thoughts because, like you, I find this to be a very interesting topic.
Many people see that 2200 hours figure thrown around online and they have little idea where it comes from or what it means. Those hours are classroom instructional hours provided by the United States Foreign Service to federal employees whose job requires language training. It is the average time expected for someone to obtain a “professional working proficiency” in the language. The programs have been developed for decades using some of the best resources available. Students are provided direct interaction with instructors, a complete curriculum, personal coaches, etc. all oriented toward getting them as proficient as possible as soon as possible. When students enter the Foreign Service language program, that’s essentially their job until they complete it (or flunk or drop out). And the classroom hours (which take up half the day) are supplemented by individual study time. I don’t know about anyone else, but as someone with a full-time job who only has access to what’s available on the Internet, I don’t see that as being a practical measure. 
One minor note to make is technically, it’s not “Limited Working Proficiency,” but actually “Professional Working Proficiency” (ILR3). Your point stands, though: it’s still a limited comprehension of the language. More importantly, it’s also well short of N1. N1 corresponds to ILR4, which is “Full Working Proficiency.” It’s estimated it can take as much time to go from 0 to ILR3 as it takes to go from ILR3 to ILR4 (just like N2 to N1). This places further skepticism on @runrun’s original claim that people are getting to N1 level in 12-18 months and then attaining fluency a year later. You would expect the opposite. (In this case I’m going with a definition of fluency that means working proficiency in the language that allows one to speak naturally without noticeable halting or faltering in speech. It should be noted that fluency is often defined in terms of productivity using the language, and not in measures like vocabulary size, grammatical correctness, or other important language considerations. But if you define fluency more generally to include being able to hear, speak, read, and write, and you measure that against a sizable vocabulary, that’s a much higher goal to attain.)
The only exception to this (passing the N1 before becoming fluent) would be for people like me for whom fluency is not a goal. My aim is to be able to read Japanese, not speak it. Consequently, I’m able to devote more time to that. The N1 only tests you on reading and listening, not speaking. If you’re able to cut out speaking and writing that can get you a shortcut to passing N1 without achieving fluency, but that’s still far from a year-long process. It takes years to get there. I’ve been studying for almost two years at around 2-5 hours per day (more if you count listening to podcasts and YouTube videos and playing Japanese language games), and I’d say I’m barely at N2 reading level right now. I have reason to believe my ability is at least average, too (i.e. I’m not a slow learner).
Couldn’t agree more, and that was exactly the same point I was going to make! 
I think the same way. Academics can’t even agree on what fluency is. Don’t spend your time comparing yourself to some kind of arbitrary measure, and don’t allow stories about people becoming fluent in the language in a year or two to discourage you when that doesn’t happen. You shouldn’t expect it. You’d need to do nothing but spend your entire waking existence studying the language to even have a chance at that. Just keep at it. You will get better the more you practice, and the more you practice the faster you’ll become proficient.
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if you have an intuitive grasp on the language then you are fluent. but sematincs aside, that should be the goal of somebody who learns a new language, because the whole point is to understand and being understood.
being able to have a conversation doesn’t imply you are fluent, especially when you translate stuff literally from your native language, which is what most people still do
nobody can undestand 100% of words, even in it’s native language. it depends on the context.
i guess that’s what elementary school children do. and also jlpt level are very arbitrary, you can’t “know” only up to n4 if you are fluent
depends un the context
there’s nothing nebulous about it, and it should be the main goal of language learning: the intuitive understanding of said language, and being able to intuitively output your own thought in it.
then of course different people have different goals, like somebody wants to learn all the kanji, how to write them, pass jlpt, finish bunpro, etc… but non of those imply that you’ll get fluent by doing that, since the skillsets are different
what people should stop wasting time on is counting the hours “until” something happens. language is a lifelong journey, you can always get better at it
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I completely understand where you’re coming from. Please don’t think that I was being critical. I only wanted to offer another perspective on how one might approach studying. Like I said, I know a lot of people prefer to take your approach and that’s absolutely fine. Each person should find what works for them best and stick with it.
Like the saying goes, “What’s the best diet? The one you’ll stick with.” What’s the best way to study Japanese? The one you’ll actually do! Because if you don’t, you certainly won’t learn it. 
One other interesting thing that comes to mind here is as adults with mastery of a native language, you (hypothetically) can access a second language better because you have a frame of reference. Now granted, what that frame of reference is can make a big difference in how effective it is. This is reflected in the Foreign Service’s ranking of languages. For an English speaker, Spanish is relatively easy to learn, whereas Japanese is exceptionally difficult. The dissimilarity in the languages makes the frame of reference less useful, so the learner has a larger knowledge gap to make up. But no matter what that first language is, it’s not starting from zero as it would be for a child growing up and learning their first language. Many of the same ideas are already crystalized in the adult’s mind, they just need to know how it’s said in the other language–they don’t have to grapple with the ideas themselves.
Adult language learners should thus not be discouraged, thinking that, “Oh, only children can really pick up a second language”–that’s an urban myth (except for pronunciation; that’s almost always the case there ). Most adults don’t actually end up acquiring a second language due to other factors that have nothing to do with ability. It’s usually things like being unable or insufficently motivated to devote enough time. In the case of foreigners living outside of Japan, another frustrating factor is you have to work very hard to even find people to talk to. You can try doing it online, but it can often be difficult to find conversation partners, and people tend to be flaky. Many of them will probably also be learners like you, and you could end up reinforcing incorrect speech patterns that could be corrected by speaking with natives.
I had to sit and think of a better way to respond to this correctly! Let me go into detail a bit more because I don’t think I explained myself well enough.
First, the academic world disagrees, which I’ll link to at the end. Second, if something is concrete and unnebulous then you need to be able to quantify it, which you can’t really do. For example, it’s the same reason why, when trying to explain the temperature to somebody, it’s more accurate to use degrees instead of “hot” or “cold” because what is considered “hot” is going to vary to different people. If somebody from Australia and somebody from Ireland visited the middle of America they likely are going to disagree if the weather is “hot” or not, but they will agree on the numeric temperature. Which brings me to:
If intuitiveness is what you are using to be able to concretely define fluency, then you need to be able to quantify it. Because:
Context. You mentioned earlier an elementary school student would be considered fluent. In what context? In what conversation? People often say “an everyday conversation” but even that conversation is going to be different person-to-person. An elementary school student will, likely, be able to “intuitively” produce their native language with somebody at a similar level and with a familiar subject; but if you had an elementary school student talk to a college professor they will likely not “intuitively” understand the conversation. Were they fluent before and not fluent now?
Let’s say we become Genki masters. You and I both sit in a room for two years exclusively studying Genki I and II. We get * so good* with what we learned from Genki that we are able to “intuitively” communicate with what we learned from Genki. In this world, we are by this definition fluent. But if we then both take a flight to Tokyo and try to talk to strangers our “intuitiveness” will likely change. Did we suddenly go from fluent to non-fluent? Were we never fluent to begin with?
This isn’t just me musing. There is no concrete definition of fluency and different people define it in different ways. This is a pretty regular conversation in a lot of language learning research. Or, to just quote the several on Wikipedia directly:
Language fluency is one of a variety of terms used to characterize or measure a person’s language ability, often used in conjunction with accuracy and complexity. Although there are no widely agreed-upon definitions or measures of language fluency, someone is typically said to be fluent if their use of the language appears fluid, or natural, coherent, and easy as opposed to slow, halting use. In other words, fluency is often described as the ability to produce language on demand and be understood.
Varying definitions of fluency characterize it by the language user’s automaticity, their speed and coherency of language use, or the length and rate of their speech output. Theories of automaticity postulate that more fluent language users can manage all of the components of language use without paying attention to each individual component of the act. In other words, fluency is achieved when one can access language knowledge and produce language unconsciously, or automatically. Theories that focus on speed or length and rate of speech typically expect fluent language users to produce language in real time without unusual pauses, false starts, or repetitions (recognizing that some presence of these elements are naturally part of speech). Fluency is sometimes considered to be a measure of performance rather than an indicator of more concrete language knowledge, and thus perception and understandability are often key ways that fluency is understood.
There is no concrete definition of being fluent to the point people are still studying what the “definition” of fluency means. There’s also just, in general, a huge difference in definitions between the words “fluent” and “fluency.”
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This thread got weird man.
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do you know the Sorites paradox? i guess the same could be applied to fluency. if a fluent person forgets 1 word/grammatical construct, will he still be fluent? what if this process keeps going on and on? is there a cutoff point from fluency to non fluency? while this is a very cool though experiment, it’s not really that important in practice
this is a very nice observation, and i agree that making a general definition of “language fluency” isn’t easy. but as we both pointed out, what’s important is the context. if you are a kid among kids, than you’ll be fluent as any other kids. if you are a teenager among teenagers then obviously you’ll need to have a better grasp on the language in order to be considered fluent.
but since most people who decide to learn a new language do so by choice (leaving aside those who do so by necessity, since in that case the context is clear), i’d think that the “context” here is your own self. that is to say, consider the definition on wikipedia (which is also how i interpret the concept of fluency):
and apply it to yourself and yourself only. this means that the “context” of fluency will become your own internal monologue with yourself, which i think would be a good generalization for the whole concept, since it would have the same validity in case you are a kid, a highschooler, an adult, or a genki 1-2 purist.
as for the paper you linked, i can’t read the full text without paying, but i also saw that it’s from 1997. i really hope there was some progress in the “fluency” field during the last 25 years, lol
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I just think language learning and psychology is cool.
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Curious to see if op did in fact finish n1 at the end of 2022
Hell nah. Depression got in the way, but I did do intensive therapy, so I’d like to start back up.
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Rip. Been there. Nice to hear you’re moving forward. Progress is progress! you got this(｡•̀ᴗ-)✧
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How do you do that?
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I feel you, simlar situation when I dropped learning Japanese 1.5 years ago. Just recently decided to pick it up again. I’m setting a more modest goal of N4 by mid year, not necessary taking the exam. And then N3 by next year mid year JLPT exam.
Last time I tried too hard and burnt out, along with other life issues at the time that made me stopped. While this time at start I’m going fast because it just relearning things I already knew, just to make sure I don’t miss anything. When new stuff come, I will have to remind myself to slow down.
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I personally do it with the free sofware kamesame, an srs system which uses wanikani pattern and items but is just reversed. If i get for example rain i write the answer down by hand like 雨 and check afterwards with normal keyboard input if its correct. If it was correct then i write it another 4 times down for the sake of practice.
Ah, I know KS. Thanks