>>435
It doesn't make sense to just drop a number in hours because everyone learns at different speeds. If you manage to study six hours a day for a month, that's a great effort, but do consider it'll be very hard for your brain to make the knowledge stick if you don't schedule time for repetition and rest.
JLPT N2 data shows an average of 1400-2000 study hours required to pass the test, but when I passed it I'd had about 600-700 hours.
(Source:
http://www.studytoday.com/JLPT.asp?lang=EN)
My take at this is that you can only feed your brain with as much as it'll bother to retain long-term, and having long studying sessions every day might be counter-productive in your learning process.
There's this guy who began studying Japanese long before me, has lived in Japan longer than me and also studies a lot more than me at home, but still has problems talking without stopping up and searching for what to say every few words, fucking up grammar every sentence, and he also can't even read most basic kanji. I think language learning is an ability that comes a lot easier to some people, but I also think his approach to language study is holding him back.
Studying is boring. You should complement your studies with more interesting activities, like watching all kinds of TV shows, reading various types of texts, and writing and talking with people. These things will improve your writing, reading, listening and speaking abilities at the same time as you're having fun.
You're saying your native language is English, are you American? In that case, you'll probably also have to put a lot of effort into getting your pronunciation right, because Japanese use a lot of sounds you don't have in your language.
I'm not typing out any of this to discourage you, but I do hope you realize that language learning is a huge task. You can't honestly expect to achieve fluency in a month, if that was indeed what you were thinking. Even a year seems very unlikely, even if you were to go to Japan and use nothing but Japanese all the time.
It's a long road, but if you figure out what pace to walk at, instead of just running like a madman until you burn out, it'll be a good experience.