すごいねʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
You set a goal, made and a plan, no stay consistent. I would also recommend some talking with a local at a community college or online with HelloTalk.
So happy for your trip, enjoy and remember to keep learning fun 
you got this!
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April/May (final) update.
I arrived in Tokyo about two weeks ago and finished my 6 months challenge.
Having a blast so far and could use quite a bit of my Japanese already 
April study consisted mostly of learning vocab, reading about 1 hour a day on satori reader, doing WaniKani daily, shadowing exercises and immersion with Japanese podcasts, YouTube and shows.
I played with the idea of starting an intermediate textbook like Quartet but ultimately decided against it. I don’t think it’s the best use of my time since I got the basics down and have a much easier time immersing in content to learn from.
Here are my all in all active study hours November through to April (including)
That adds up to 843 hours studied in total over 6 months.
Here the distibution:
If want to hear a foreigner speak Japanese after 5 months of study, I made a few videos on YouTube. Here is the 5 month update video (a month old): 5 Months Japanese Learning Update Video
It’s definitely not perfect, but I have had a ton of fun learning and feel like I’m on a good path to fluency.
I had a few longer conversations here in Japan with Japanese locals which went quite well in terms of understanding and outputting. Yesterday for example I went to an 居酒屋 and had a ton of fun talking to a few locals there. Another time I talked to an older Japanese lady while hiking 高尾山 near Tokyo. She was quite chatty and told me things about the plants, and things like that around the mountain.
These encounters are the exact reason why I started learning Japanese. To connect with the people here on a deeper level than the normal tourist.
But, this was probably the most Japanese I have spoken since arriving in Tokyo. Most of the other interactions are quite short. For example ordering food, asking for directions, talking to shop staff etc. All of which were very easy to handle with my current level of Japanese.
Next week I will meet up with one of my iTalki teachers for a few drinks, which I’m also excited for 
I reached my goal of “speaking proficiency”, but I still have a bit to go to become “fluent”.
The solution here is simple, though. At this point it comes mostly down to vocab. I know around 2.5k - 3k words, maybe more maybe a bit less. I know this is quite a range, but I haven’t been keeping track of the exact number as I’m picking up a lot of words through reading and listening to podcasts/youtube. I picked up the 2k/6k deck and plan to finish it by the end of November this year. I also do sentence mining with shows YouTube and podcasts.
I quite enjoyed doing WaniKani so far and I will continue doing it until I got the 常用漢字 down. I really hope they make the upcoming “kana only vocab” optional, though. I’m not looking forward to repeating them for no reason.
Also, another shoutout to @SoraR for recommending the Miku Real Japanese course. I bought the whole thing and blazed through it in 5 months. This course really helped a ton, as I could do it while in the gym or on a walk. Can highly recommend it if you like taking in information through listening.
This was the final update. I hope you enjoy learning Japanese as much as I do.
Happy learning!
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boy, so sad I literally heard about your thread a minute ago
From the looks of it, you made it! congrats!!
I’ll be checking it out with more calm since I made a not-that-brutal commitment to myself for the next year.
Always happy to hear about success stories and read about their paths
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Congrats and thanks for sharing your journey and taking up my suggestion.
I think there are lots of learners share this aspiration so I hope they draw inspiration from what you’ve accomplished. I like how you made it an emphasis to focus on the 800 hours rather than the 6 months time frame. 800 hours will not be much different than what many people spend on WK (+Forums) over a year to year and a half or so making it a much less “unrealistic” goal imo.
Just out of curiosity, do you remember what level on WK you were at the end of the 6 months?
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I’m sorry if I missed it, but I was curious what method/program you were using to track your time? I’ve never really thought of keeping track of the individual categories of study but the clean layout of the graphs is very convincing ( ´ ▿ ` )
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Thanks
I made it to level 21 in WK in the last week of the challenge. I took around one or two week breaks from new Kanji lessons all in all to focus on Grammar and more speaking along the way. This makes 21 levels in about 5 months, since I started getting into Kanji around the end of the first month of the challenge.
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I use the tracking system from Timeular for pretty much anything I do.
For this challenge I transferred the tracked data into Google sheets and created my own graphs for it.
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Congrats on your success so far. Keep it up!
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Thanks. Appreciate it
wow 
i can’t even keep up a consistent study routine for a week…
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I enjoyed your video on a technique to improve speaking ability without booking language lessons:
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