Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
The person who comes to mind is a colleague of mine, Minh, who speaks Japanese fluently enough that clients regularly assume he grew up there, even though he's never actually lived in Japan for more than a few months at a stretch. He picked it up almost entirely through work — our company deals with a fair number of Japanese clients, and rather than relying on translators the way most of us do, he just started teaching himself around six years ago, watching Japanese business meetings back afterwards, correcting his own notes, that kind of slow, unglamorous repetition. It wasn't formal study particularly, at least not at first — no classroom, mostly just exposure and a fairly stubborn refusal to let himself rely on English in meetings once he'd decided to commit to it. It's helped him enormously, in fairly obvious professional ways — he now leads most of our Japan-facing accounts and travels there several times a year — but also in less obvious ones; he says clients there trust him differently once he's speaking their language rather than working through an interpreter, that some of what actually gets discussed only comes up once that barrier is gone. I've asked him a few times how long it took before he felt properly comfortable, and he's fairly honest that it was years, not months, which I actually find more encouraging than discouraging when I think about the language I'm trying to learn now.