>>66
My Spanish is good enough to watch a normal tv show and get all of it, save for maybe one or two words every 10 minutes. It does still require lots of effort though, and when I'm tired, I barely understand half of what I hear.
When reading a somewhat more sophisticated book (reading cien años de soledad right now, oarsome so far) I still have to look up about 1 word per page. No problems with grammar.
I've also been posting some stuff here and there on 1492chan, and it seems I can pretty much blend in, as long as I don't write a fucken essay.
Also, I started out with a crappy school-Spanish too. I wasn't even able to read a news article without looking up every third word. Took me about a year of practice/self-study to get where I'm now.
I only started learning Japanese roughly a month ago, the first 2 weeks being devoted exclusively to kana. I know maybe 100 Kanji and some very basic grammar.