Igirisu kara kita otoko no hito to Nihongo ni tsuite

Did I mention that three of the boys from my intensive Japanese class (all from the same university in England) live in my building? 213, 214, and 216 (and I'm in 224). It makes things a little interesting in class when we role-play:

Sensei: Tonari no hito ni uchi ni iki-kata o kiitekudasai. [Ask the person next to you how to get to his/her house.]
Phillip-san [whispers]: ...but we live in the same building...
Me [whispers back]: just pretend...
Phillip-san: Indu-san no uchi ni ikitaindesu ga, dou ittara ii desu ka? [I want to go to your house, how should I go? ... which is funny too because the ~taindesu construction implies some pretty serious feelings of desire]
or
Sensei: Tonari no hito no heya nitsuite, kiite e o kaitekudasai. [Ask about your neighbor's room, and draw a picture.]
*time passes*
Sensei: Tad-san, Phillip-san no heya wa dou desu ka? [Tad, what do you think of Phillip's room?]
Tad-san: Phillip-san no heya to watashi no heya ga onaji desu. [Our rooms are the same.]

Anyway, they're all three very cute kids. I've been picking up Tad's music on iTunes, including some recordings of him beat-boxing, and Chris plays bass. Phillip's my favourite though. He always seems on the verge of asking or saying something, but seems hesitant, like he doesn't know quite how to go about it with me. Today in class he asked me how things were going (in Japanese), and I asked him if he cooks for himself. He says his rice isn't great, so I was extolling the virtues of my rice cooker. After getting home, I caught him and Tad doing laundry, looking a little stressed out and confused about it. When we said good-bye afterward, he seemed like he had more to say, but nothing came out. Very cute. Maybe tomorrow, I will make rice in my rice cooker and take some to Phillip-san. He's also said he likes anime, so maybe, if he brought some with him, I could ask to borrow some (or watch together). He seems a little more open to making friends and hanging out together outside of class than Tad or Chris. It might also be nice to cook with (or for) someone. I just don't want to come across as too forward or something...

As for Japanese, it's not too bad yet, considering we have four class periods a day. Some of the grammar is review, but I've forgotten nearly all my kanji (Chinese characters), so I'm practicing that outside of class. Yet... Kishimoto-sensei, the teacher of my NYU summer course, kept emphasizing that Japanese was easy but... no way. I think he was just trying to encourage optimism, but honestly, there are so many different ways to say the same thing... well, it's not *really* the same thing. The literal translation is the same, but you use one when you want to imply such-and-such emotion and you use another for such-and-such emotion or... some other nonsense. Conditional, tatoeba [for example]...

V-plain +to +Clause2

Clause2 is an automatic consequence of V-ing

V-plain -[u] +[e]ba +Clause2

the condition has not yet been realized or is counter-factual or purely hypothetical, and has an iff implication

V-plain +nara +Clause2

the condition was mentioned previously in context, as in "if it is the case that" or "since" V (originated by someone other than speaker)

V-plain-past +ra + Clause2

the condition must be completed before Clause2 takes place

Or transitive and intransitive... why do there have to be two different verbs for "I open the door" and "The door opens"...? I mean, really. And there's no consistent rule there either... sometimes the intransitive is an [u]-verb and the transitive a [ru]-verb, sometimes the two start with the same syllable... The content is clear from the kanji, but it's entirely possible I'd read it out loud incorrectly.

I can't keep all these little details straight when I'm actually trying to *use* and speak Japanese. I wonder if it takes longer for a Japanese child to get to the same competency level of an English child. I wouldn't be surprised.

As complicated as it can get, I find it really fascinating... on multiple levels. The kanji are really cool to learn, to understand how they developed (and it's always fun to translate them literally, "tomorrow" for example is written with two kanji - "bright" and "day"), and all these little contextual/emotional details that are embedded in the grammar... is it because Japanese developed specifically to be a more emotionally expressive language, or is it just because it's relatively phonemically poor and they therefore had to improvise a multitude of ways to say everything without saying a lot? And I wonder, because so much emotion and implication *are* embedded in actual grammatical constructs, is chatting online in Japanese generally less ambiguous than chatting in English sometimes is?