日本語を勉強しています

Translation: Studying Japanese. I know you're all wondering, 'how much Japanese is Thanh learning, we know what she's like with work!' I have an hour and a half of Japanese every day, and they set us homework every night for the next day so its work, work, work all the time. We move so fast through the textbook, learning so many new things everday, and its been ages since I've had to study another language. Im not even used to the terminology the teachers use to convey things, let along Japanese itself eg. Perfective and imperfective forms, particles, conjugation, demonstrative pronouns etc. Its worse when there's an entire sentence in the textbook with all those terms in and I am sitting there thinking, 'en anglaise, s'il vous plait?'

So far, we've learnt hiragana, which is the phonetic alphabet. Now we're moving onto katakana, another alphabet for foreign words, and then next week we'll start on the kanji, which is made up of many katakanas all drawn in one box. So in the heading, the three beginning 'boxes' are kanji, there's a hiragana particle in the middle, followed by kanji, and then some more hiragana at the end.

They've taught us directions; introductory conversations: what's your name, where are you from, what do you study; describing what we're doing, have done, will do, did; counting numbers and telling the time; how to add 'and' into our sentences because that would involve a conjugation of the verbs and particles. Same with making a negative statement, as in 'I didnt do that'. Confusing?