A very common situation when learning Japanese in Singapore (or anywhere else for that matter) is when a learner advances through the levels in schools (for formal learnng), he/she will find that the number of classmates in his/her class will decrease exponentially. It's possible that other learners are self-studying, but I think the main reason is simple: the majority give up studying due to various reasons e.g. "Japanese is harder than I thought", "I have school/work/other commitments", etc.
I think "Japanese is harder than I thought" is basically the plateau that a learner is stuck at. This stage is also the most crucial as whether he/she continues learning or not depends on whether he/she can overcome the plateau.
Thus, I'll like to recycle something else I wrote in July 2010 (also not longer available) in Japanese Meetup's Message Board. It should provide a solution to how to overcome the plateau issue.
<Start>
I've read something in English written by a native Japanese person in a Japanese learning forum that is so good I thought it'll be good to share it with everyone here (native Japanese generally don't hang around in Japanese learning forums that are in English so whenever this guy writes something, I'll always read his post with great interest)
In learning Japanese (or anything, for that matter), what do you do when you hit a plateau?
The following is what the guy wrote (I'm quoting him verbatim):
"Language learning is like that. You feel your Japanese improved greatly at first, and then you kind of get disappointed by your slow progress. You don't think you've made any progress lately, then suddenly you feel like you just made a huge leap and got to the whole new level. And you feel like you got stuck again. That's how it works.
But of course you might actually hit a plateau if you've been thinking you haven't made any progress for a long time. In that case, you might want to rethink your goal, your study method, how much time you spend on Japanese each day, and so on.
It's not the total amount of time you've sent learning Japanese in your life that dictates how far you can get. It's how much effort you put at any given moment because language is "use it or lose it," i.e., your language skills always get rusty if you don't constantly hone them.
How fast can a car go? The longer you press the gas pedal, the faster the vehicle travels until it hits the limit the gas pedal dictates. To get faster, you should step on it deeper. You release your foot, and the car slows down.
The height of your own "plateau" is determined by the commitment/seriousness/effort/whatever you put while learning. As long as you keep learning Japanese, you will eventually hit the level you set by yourself. If you've been at the same level for, say, a couple years, most likely that's the limit you can get through your learning style.
If the level is not satisfactory, you might want to change either your learning style or goal. It doesn't seem like you'd make huge progress by the same on-and-off learning.
Some people put incredible amounts of effort because they're obsessed with the language. They may not even think they're putting effort at all. Some people work as hard or even harder because of the situations they're in such as jobs. They will eventually learn to speak Japanese amazingly well. And many people learn Japanese casually, and they get to the level they can reach because they didn't give up. Their foreign language skills may not be as good, but they achieved their goals.
Language learning is simple. Some methods may work really well for some people, but they'd reach the same level with other methods as long as they don't give up, though their progress might be slower.
Some people advocate "immersion" into Japanese. I think the philosophy of many of the immersion methods is that if you put your pedal to the metal, you'll eventually reach your max speed. And most likely it's the fastest way to reach any level as long as you don't neglect important basic grammar and such. Obviously, it's the only way to reach your highest possible level too.
I don't know what the OP's goal is or how fluent s/he wants to be. But I think JLPT 2 level is already pretty good. And if you want to improve your Japanese when you think you already hit the max level you can get by the current learning style, you just need to be more serious. I don't think your problem is complicated. It should be solved in a pretty straightforward way.
Because you know how you've been learning Japanese, you should be able to get a rough guesstimate about what level your plateau is. If your goal is higher than the level, all you need to do is work harder or lower the goal.
Also, I think it's important to always keep in mind that native speakers have been flooring it for their entire lives. Maybe they didn't take advantage of an efficient, systematic learning method. But they've been using it 24/7 (They dream in Japanese too!) and leaned tons of stuff at school (How long do you think you need to learn all those words and phrases from science jargon to expressions from classical Japanese?). So reaching even 1/100 of native fluency is already a remarkable achievement if you consider how much time and effort you have to put to achieve that.
I don't know who would read this long post, but what I thought when I read the OP was that pressing down the gas pedal halfway on and off only gets you so far when it comes to speed (= fluency) for obvious reasons."
<End>
