Mandarin - complete novice to fluency.

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Ah no, that's perfectly fine. It's up to the individual when it comes to the perceiving the difficulty of the language in question anyway. I for one, choose to think optimistically and while your points are very valid, they are also not always the case as I have experienced time and time again.

Just today I waltzed into a Chinese reflexology store, a Chinese restaurant, and a few Chinese shops all the while conversing in Mandarin that was clearly out of tone. Yet I did not have any problems with communications at all -- in fact, I kept to a certain cadence that is spoken by the majority of the people in the country, and I managed fine. In fact, I was able to keep up with lively banter in Mandarin, and the shopowners did not feel that my Mandarin was bad enough to need correction (they didn't even bat an eye when I spoke, actually. It was like they thought I was local or something). I will not of course, say that speaking out of tone is a good thing, but I am just saying that it is definitely not necessary in order to be understood in daily conversations. And get this: I am not a native in Mandarin. I didn't even study Mandarin. I just picked it up whilst living in Malaysia.

Personally though, this "study" that foreigners seem to love to do is not the most important when wanting to learn how to speak Mandarin. Naturally, if you wish to learn to read or write, some degree of self-study in order to recognise the characters is expected. But speaking a tonal language needs listening skills, and what better way to hone these listening skills than to listen to natives talking? This is precisely why I say that you can learn to understand Mandarin (even more so than Spanish or German or other European languages) by simply listening to it being spoken. Vocab will of course, be acquired naturally, like a baby What is fascinating is that my Bulgarian friend managed to understand most of daily conversation within two or so months of moving here, and she didn't bother to do any study! She doesn't speak it though, because she can't be bothered to, but at least she knows enough to manoeuvre around the place without much problems at all.

I will of course, not gloss it over. What I was trying to say all this while is that Mandarin is extremely easy to pick up, but extremely hard to perfect , especially if you're being anal about your tones being right all the time

I also see that your location is currently in China. It is true that accents in China tends to have more enunciated tones (the Beijing accent is traumatising ), so you probably can't get away as much by speaking out of tone like I do.

Oh, and the OP needs to clarify what he means by 'reasonable degree of fluency'. My interpretation of it is that the OP wants to know enough Mandarin to get around day-to-day, although your interpretation might be different still, hence the clash in opinion.

I'm also very bad at time estimations. A year, or two makes no difference to me at all!