Busy days

Started school on Monday, so my first week of learning Japanese will be accomplished tomorrow (writing on Thursday night, but can't post now due to no internet connection at home). It's been busy days for sure. Actually, my days has consisted of waking up, eating breakfast, studying a little, going to school, coming home and having dinner (finally figured out how to use the timer function on my rice cooker, so the rice is done when I come home, just need to make some sauce etc), relaxing for 30 minutes or so and then studying and going to bed.
But hell, I ain't complaining. I want to learn the basics of this language as soon as possible so I can even have a decent dialogue with people other than swedes and the few english speaking people I meet. I'm here to learn Japanese after all.
Don't have much things to do anyway, so I'm fine with studying most of the day. Life certainly gets quite different when you don't have a mobile phone, no Internet connection, can't understand what's on the tv, hardly know anyone other than a few other people who are also studying, and if you want to talk to someone else, you can't manage to have a conversation consisting of more than a couple of sentences with 99% of the people you meet.

My class consists of 12-14 students or so. There are some Chinese and Koreans, then there are one person each from Thailand, Taiwan, Australia, Russia, Spain and Italy, and finally two swedes except for me.
We have four lessons per day, 45 minutes each. Starting at 1 in the afternoon and finishing at 4.30.
So far, it's a good group and good teachers I'd say. Mostly, we're practising saying basic sentences and responding properly.

Most of the things we've gone through so far I already knew (but had put them somewhere in the back of my head), but it takes some time anyway to get used to using such a different language.
What's taken most (all) of my time outside school is the writing. It takes hours and hours just to write a bunch of pages of homework. When you're not used to writing the Japanese characters, you constantly have to think for a short time about which character you're going to write and how it's written. When writing a few pages, that short time adds up to hours. And that's only the kana characters so far. But of course, it's necessary to learn the basic characters very well first, so you have something to start with. It certainly helps that I've practised this stuff a little bit before. It's not really difficult things, but this time it really is about bashing stuff into your head time after time until your brain stops complaining and chooses to remember those essential things as something for daily use. A bit different from learning it in Sweden and storing it far back in your head.

For those of you without much knowledge of the Japanese language, the kana characters are some hundred or so characters which makes up the syllables of the Japanese language, they're mostly used as particles for the more complex kanji characters and to write foreign words.
Next week we'll start with the kanji, the more complex chinese characters of which we should learn a bit less than 2000 during the coming two years. As you might know, they have different meanings and are used in other ways in the Chinese language, so you don't get Chinese as a bonus when learning to write Japanese.

Please note that I'm not whining at all, actually I'm happy ­with everything so far and see it as a good challenge to learn Japanese.I'm certainly looking forward to the day when I'll be able to use the language well enough to express most of my basic thoughts, feelings and needs. Hopefully it won't take too long.