[throwaway2037]

    > I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)

While I certainly believe your story, I hope that you know he is an extreme outlier with super-human level of memorization and recall. Tiny question: Do you know if his uni with in the countryside or a big city? The people whom I have met that gained fluency the fastest (normies here, no superhumans, please!) all had significant time lived in the countryside, so they had an immersive language learning experience.

[wodenokoto]

Now that you mentioned it, he did spend time at a language program out in the sticks before I met him.

But still impressive.

[throwaway2037]

Thank you to confirm. He probably had the "perfect storm" of countryside language immersion with excellent recall. (I am jealous!) It is always bloody impressive to me to see someone achieve near native-level understanding of Japanese coming from a completely different linguistic culture.