While it's different for each individual, depending on your goals you can definitely learn Japanese in 7 years! I've been studying for 5 years and I'm at N2 level (early advanced), so reaching N1 (advanced) in 7 years is entirely doable. A lot of people study quicker than I do as well, so it's possible to probably even reach N1 in just a few years if you put enough time into it.
yea I think you can I have a friend that learned to speak japanese and it took them I think 8 years or so to get pretty fluent so it is definitely possible what matters tho is if you are going to commit every-single day for 7 years to at least do 10 minutes of Japanese without fail thats probably the hardest thing ( speaking from experience as I am not even 6 months into my learning )
Learning a language is not a set of checkboxes to mark off, and so you'll never be able to get an exact number that means "I understand language XX after YY amount of time", even if we all learned at the same pace, speed, efficiency, etc. The reason for that is our goals and interaction with the language are always going to be different, and so what is required (in a very rough sense) to be what one would consider "good enough" in Japanese is going to be different for every person, and even for a single person during different stages in their life :)
Everything from motivation and time to study per day/ month/ year as well as understanding certain bits and pieces can change the time needed for "proficency" in the language.
Some people learn quicker while others learn at a slower pace. Also proficiency means lots of things like, speaking confidently, being able to do something etc. So there is no way to measure proficiency but really, my interpretation of proficiency is confidence and ability to speak a language as close to a 'local level' as possible.
While keeping in mind all the caveats about what it even means to learn a language, if you put in an hour or two of work every day, in seven years you can get quite far in the process of learning japanese.
I’m 6 years in, and i can read manga with relative ease (still have to look up new words of course), and understand a reasonable amount of anime without subtitles (enough to understand the plot, most of the time). i’m no good at speaking though. But that’s just where i am, others are at very different points in their journey after this time.
