So I'm taking my first Japanese class

I just thought I could be more of a help around here, and it might help me on later video game knowledge. But either way, I'm beginning Japanese. The closest thing to prior experience I have is knowing some Chinese characters (for Kanji) and one or two Japanese characters from Katakana. So yeah, I'm new.

For those who have to learn Japanese, what can be expected? Memorizing is pretty much a given, but my brother told me about funky grammar rules.

Also, what's the fundamental difference between Katakana and Hiragana? I know Katakana is used for English names -> Japanese (i.e. Mario to マリオ), but what is Hiragana for again? I've seen it used in Japanese onomatopoeia, but what else?

If you can provide me any hints and expectations, that would be useful.

Thanks!

Hiragana is the basic syllabary of the language. Outside of writing, it serves as a pronunciation guide for most words, since the readings of every kanji (which by themselves or combined with at least one other make words, and they have Chinese and Japanese readings depending on whether they're by themselves or are with other kanji) correspond to at least one of the kana. Certain individual kana act as particles in sentences, so you will see a mixture of kanji and hirakana in essentially every sentence you come across (side note about katakana, it's also used to emphasize native words and compose certain loan words). Studying kanji will take up most of your study of the writing system (most people study the jouyou kanji, or the ~2,000 most commonly used). As for hints and expectations, the Japanese people omit subjects that are believed to be understood (as is done in English, except more often here), verbs appear at the end of sentences, the singular and plural forms of words are mostly identical, and there are degrees of politeness that must be used depending on to whom you are speaking (i.e. there are verb forms, forms of address, etc that are inappropriate in some situations but not in others).

This obviously isn't everything, but it's enough to give you a basic idea of what to expect.

Thanks!

What's the usual pacing of the class anyway? I'm learning Hiragana, but I think I'm expected to learn at least with 70% accuracy the Hiragana AND some vocabulary and numbers sometime next week. This sounds like a lot. @-@ I can't wait to learn about some grammar.

I wouldn't be able to tell you about class pacing, since I opted not to take a class route to learn Japanese. Instead, I'm using Rosetta Stone, Lang-8, and other resources. Based on that, with daily practice, reading hiragana and katakana took me about a month (though I forget katakana sometimes since I don't see it often).