I think it should take one year to become fluent in a language and be able to read it and write in it as well.
So don't compare yourself to other people. Their study style is different to yours. Their methods are different to yours. You'll become fluent like them as well, don't worry. Already in two days of shadowing (proper shadowing - the same sentence repeated multiple times), I am sounding better, with more natural pronunciation. I'm picking up a lot of the grammar as well. It really paid off to study the International Learners book. It was hard but it was a gem of a book. I have learned a lot from that. Now reading simple stuff is easy.
I find reading the KGU book easy now. All the sentences are easy for me.
With subsequent languages, I will learn relatively fast, I think. With Japanese, so long as I get romanization for all the sentences I want to learn, I will learn speaking fast. The writing part and reading part will be hard though. I really don't want to learn kanji. If I learn 10 Kanji a day though, in a year, I will have learned 3000 Kanji words. I think that's enough really.
