Benny at the half-way point

with a short video here.  Perhaps less confident in Japanese than he was after 6 weeks in some of his other Fluent In Three Months language challenges, but he has been ill, and he sounds confident about the second half of the challenge.

Speaking fluently has never been the aim of any of my language learning; for me a language is text, not sounds.  This is probably the wrong way to go about it but it's far too late for me to change now.  Certainly with Japanese it's the fascinating writing system that got me interested, and of the books on Japanese that I have that try to introduce the writing system simultaneously with basic grammar and vocabulary, many make the reasonable point that since kanji are what attracts so many to the language it's a shame to defer study of the writing system until there's been a lot of the spoken language covered.