in the beginning

So far, Japanese has been fun and not too difficult. I find some similarities to Chinese which make the mental adjustment easier than, say, Chinese-to-English; the respective possessives, no and de, function similarly, as does the logic of certain word combinations: daigakue/daxue, daigakusei/daxuesheng, gakusei/xuesheng.

So far, I'm finding flash cards and repetitive writing sufficient to keep up in class, and I find that the homework is not too difficult.

I'm a little apprehensive about the switch to hiragana and katakana, but I imagine persistence will pay off as it did with Chinese characters, and at least the size of both alphabets is pleasantly limited.