Nyororin - how did you learn Japanese?
 

This is not only to Nyororin but anyone who speaks Japanese fluently. How did you learn it? did you rote memorize kanji? Did you read books and newspapers? What did you do?

Of the people on JF? They're either Japanese born and bred or they've lived in Japan for ages and/or married Japanese nationals (and sometimes had Japanese speaking kids). That pretty much cinches it. There's no real way to 'learn' fluency in ANY language. You 'learn' up to a high-functioning version of the language. Then you absorb native-fluency by sheer use, practice and exposure. If you're lucky. Lots of people don't.

And you have to like it LOL. I got a 5 year old daughter and even though I have been speaking to her only in Italian all she does is speak English. She knows close to 0 of Italian.
:)

Yuuuup~ passive learning =/= productive skills, sadly. Man, I WISH just cramming kanji or french verbs or something would magically make me fluent. Then again, I've had so much wine tonight; I'm impressed I'm still fluent in English.

Writing, rewriting, over and over and over again.

Living in Japan and talking to people. Then moving on to reading books once I could.

That`s really about it.