This is off-topic, but I don't think it's fair to say that it takes 12 years to read and write Japanese fluently. That's just the time that it takes to graduate

This is off-topic, but I don't think it's fair to say that it takes 12 years to read and write Japanese fluently. That's just the time that it takes to graduate from high-school in Japan. In fact, the mandatory education in Japan comprises only elementary and junior high school, which takes 9 years in total. By the time you graduate you're supposed to know all of the 2000ish 常用漢字　(Jouyou Kanji=Common Use Kanji). If you add a couple of hundred of place and people names, you'd get a good approximation of "fluent reading and writing Japanese", as far as kanji is concerned. If you're learning on your own, there's no reason it should take 9 years. If you learn it at a rate of 10 characters a week, you could learn 2000 in 4 years. That said, I think the emphasis people put on learning a lot of kanji, without being able to speak the language, is misguided.