Nihon-go wa muzukashii desu

(The Japanese language is difficult)
I haven't given up the Japanese classes yet, despite the fact that it's a humbling experience. But I do actually start to understand stuff and do not feel so inferior to my classmates anymore. Since Alex has been promoted, the average level in the class is not so much higher than mine anymore I guess (no offense, dear classmates!). I do not seem to give significantly more stupid answers than the rest.
Well, most teachers we had so far were really nice and also seemed to possess some humour. There was one exception last Friday. "Miss Nasty" really made us feel that we're a bunch of retards, she'd constantly make remarks that we were not good enough. The two lessons got pretty messy because everybody was rather fighting against her instead of learning from her. She told Jon that he should have studied Hiragana at home and he was like "yeah, I can study everything at home, so why do I come here?" and Robert looked up the Japanese word for nasty and kept repeating it more or less aloud (which she ignored). That really wasn't a productive class at all.
Otherwise our lessons are really fun and we are all participating. We do a lot of small group work and communication thingies which is the most useful for us. The Japanese sentences have quite a different structure and contain all these strange particles which makes it a bit tricky. I guess you get a feeling for it over time and forming the sentence will become more natural.
I made a funny mistake today. I was supposed to say: "I don't know how to say this in Japanese, may I say this in English". Instead I said: "I don't know...., may I go to England?". Hm, my vocab is not superb yet...
Camille usually says a lot of fun stuff too. She replies in a way that indicates that she has no clue what the task is. Like you should translate questions to Japanese such as "Can I make a phone call?" and she replies with "no, it's too expensive". But she is also occupied with drawing manga during lessons, so at least doing cultural studies.

We also tend to abuse new grammar that we've learned. We have studied the polite "-te" form for the past few days. So now when somebody wants to say "I'm going to kill you", we would say the more polite "shinde, kudasai" = "please die"... You see, we are learning some Japanese manners :-)

So, I need to do some homework now and we'll have a vocab test as well tomorrow.