Accepted into Graduate School, Conitnuing to learn Japanese

I've some exciting news. I was recently accepted into Keio University's IADP program. I'll be moving to Japan in a little over a month, and will have many more experiences with which to update this blog. The IADP is a program in which a mix of Japanese and international students are brought together to be taught in an English language environment. While I would certainly like to be immersed in Japanese, even while taking classes, my language ability is nowhere near a "college" level of comprehension. The program I am entering will allow me to continue in my pursuit of computer science, and will combine classes with research based on a proposal I submitted along with my application.

I'm still studying Japanese with a private tutor. In the last few weeks I really feel that my Japanese has improved substantially. It's like I can more easily formulate sentences, and fluidly switch between Japanese and English in my head. I'm still hampered by my vocabulary through, as well as a lack of knowledge on a few basic sentence constructs and verb tenses that I'm aware of ("eba" conditional tense, passive verbs D:). Most of all, my lack of focus in the area of Kanji is really starting to irritate me. One of my goals is to learn how to read and write Kanji, but that has proven to be a very difficult task.