/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>44506590
It depends on how much you care about efficient time usage.
If you have all the time in the world, even if it's the first thing you've ever read in Japanese, with an electronic dictionary and elbow grease you can get more meaning out of a text than you would from reading a bad translation. (And about as much as much meaning as a good translation, although I imagine you know as well as I do how rare those are.)
The issue is that reading with good comprehension is absurdly slow when you're new. I used To Love-Ru as a textbook when I was starting out and I think my reading speed was something like fifteen minutes a page. If you've never read To Love-Ru, these were pages with small amounts of easy text with furigana. It doesn't really get easier than that.
The good news is that this is very effective studying and your reading speed will improve asymptotically as your vocabulary and experience grows. But it will be excruciatingly slow for a while.
In terms of being able to read with solid comprehension without it being agonizingly difficult, I'd say three months of reading experience at minimum. And you'll be going turtle speed for at least your first year. You'll be getting more out of a story than you would from a good translation I'd say within your first two years.
Watching is harder because you are forced to go at a specific pace. I'd recommend just picking an arbitrary young children's anime and watching it until it feels comfortable, then working your way up age levels until you can watch anything.
If you'd like a recommendation for a decent young children's anime, I watched the original かみさまみならい ヒミツのここた (picrel) as my starter raw anime and enjoyed the experience.
Gun to my head I'd say it'd take you a hundred episodes-ish total to get decent listening comprehension, but depending on how you approach it that number could vary wildly.