Freelancing in east asia? Tips? Advice?

Hey everyone. (skip to bottom to skip the background and go to my questions)

First off, this:

Nathaniel: SWEET! I figured it out! Finally! BWUAHAHAHAHAAHHA!!! And it was so *bleep simple too! god damn it! hahahahah*

Patrick: Feels good huh!? That's addicting It's what keeps me going ;-)

My friend Patrick works in the software field and initially turned me on to programming.

That was earlier today. Finally figured out how to line up my images with bootstrap responsive stuff. I spent about 8 hours total the past two days researching and reading and learning a bunch of stuff.

So a couple months ago I decided to work towards becoming a freelance web developer. I'm currently in Japan learning Japanese, and taking classes from Treehouse to learn to how become a web developer.

Basically, as of right now, I go through a lesson in Treehouse, then continue building upon and improving my website with the skills I learn. I also plan to ask people for project ideas, maybe even find people to act like customers for practice.

Ideally, I would like to accept jobs through online freelance boards, if possible... work a few jobs a month to pay the bills when I move to Taiwan and learn Mandarin. However, I do not know how good those freelance boards can be for finding work.

After I learn enough Mandarin, I would like to work more locally as well.

Has anyone here become a freelance developer? Are there any tips you can give me? Any who live in east Asia (Japan (osaka maybe?) Taiwan?) who would know what to do to start and build up towards becoming freelance?

I'm going to end it here before the "question" gets too long. Thanks for your help.