Trying to learn Japanese

Few weeks ago I managed to hand in the papers for the Monbukagakusho scholarship. It was not easy though.

I had to gather a lot of papers: official acamedic schores, confidential recommendation letters, certificate of health, portfolio, an abstract of my thesis in English, CV in English and Spanish and the most difficult one,.. an essay explaining what I want to study/research there.

It was a nightmare the fact of getting ready all that papers while I was having the final deadline of the project where I was working on in the office. Adding the difficulties that entails the fact of being in a foreign country at the time,.. I think that was almost a miracle that I managed to gather all the papers in just 3 weeks,...

Of course, I had a lot of people helping me. My sister collecting the recommendation forms and sending them, David collecting the official certificate of my scores and giving it to my sister, my mum doing the certified copies of the official documents, my flatmate Eli tranlating the official document into English, Sharan checking the English of my essay and abstract, Vimal binding the different copies of the portfolio,... and a long etc,... I finally finished writting the day before sending it that was the last day,.. uffff!!! such a stressing time!! but now it is done and I am waiting for the results,.. :S Let's see if I am lucky enough and I can pass to the second stage,...

Probalby I'll receive the results this week,.. and if I pass I'll have to travel to Madrid to take an English and a Japanese exam so,.. since I've sent the envelope with all the papers for the scholarship I started to study Japanese.

I bought several books: Japanese for busy people was the first of them, and after I tried with teach yourself Japanes (45minutes a day during 6 weeks) but 3 days ago I called to the Japanese Embassy to ask about the result and the exams and they told me that the exam will be in Japanese characters not in roman letters as what I was studying. AGhhh!!!! so since 3 days ago I'm trying to learn to read Japanese,...

I've started with Kanji (chinese letters) but Tomo and Audun told me that it was the most difficult part, that I should start with Hiragana. So,.. now I'm starting to learn Hiragana and Katakana. They are two different syllabaries, one that is used for words with Japanese procedence and the other one for foreign names and imported words. They not only mixed these two syllabaries but they mix them with Kanjies as well!!! It's crazy!!! I've already knew these because Tomo explained to me some time ago,.. but once you start learning it you realized even more how difficult it is,..

Let's see what can I do,...