Learning Japanese

On Monday, Shawn and I had our first Japanese class. It's great to be doing this with him because we can practice together. He's very quick to pick it up and has no problem with pronounciation. I'm finding it so, so, so much easier than Mandarin. No tones to remember! Yay! I'm sure it helps that I went to Japan in 2004, albeit for only 6 or 7 days. I taught myself a few phrases before I left and actually used most of them... probably badly, but at least they could understand me even if I couldn't understand much of what was said back to me. I'm very interested to see how I'll feel by the end of the course and I'm really looking forward to being able to go back to Japan, this time with Shawn, and use what we've learned on native speakers. There is no planned trip or anything and we're busy trying to save money at the moment, but one day, I'm definitely going back.