Oh and about Japanese- you might be surprised to find out that it's actually a very logical language. The difficulty is not in learning the sentence structures- if you're of a methodical cast of mind, that's actually pretty easy. The difficulty is in reading the language. Because it is character-based, like Chinese, rather than alphabet-based, it is very difficult for a foreigner to become fluent in it. In order to read a newspaper, for instance, you have to memorise roughly 10,000 characters and their meanings. In order to read full books in Japanese, it's supposed to be closer to 50,000. But if you have a good teacher (or good teaching software), you'll pick up the basics of what you need in a few weeks of dedicated study.

I'd say it's worse than a scam, actually. I'd call it outright indoctrination. Two examples of this come to mind- the information that I was given on the War Between the States, and the way they taught us the difference between Left-wing and Right-wing in my IB history course.

I was in Australia when I was being taught about the War Between the States- they called it the American Civil War, of course. My teacher was great- he brought the dry battles and history to life by telling stories of the men who fought in it. But make no mistake, what we were taught was pure Northern propaganda. It wasn't until I came to the States and read The Real Lincoln that I realised just how much of what we learn in history classes amounts to only the victor's side of history.

In Singapore I was taught that Stalin was an example of a left-wing dictator, and Hitler was an example of a right-wing dictator. This is of course completely arrant nonsense. The reality is that the National Socialists were left-wing loonies every bit as much as their Commie counterparts. Unfortunately, if you write anything of the sort in your final exams, you fail, because for all of its vaunted claims about teaching you how to think, the IB still follows a rigid curriculum predetermined by the Powers That Be.

Personally I'm of the opinion that if I ever have kids, I'm going to have them homeschooled. They're likely to end up progressing a lot faster if they do. I was lucky in that I went to very demanding, very selective schools, but even then, there were times when I was sitting in class (especially maths class in my last 2 years of school) thinking, "I get this already, let me move ahead".

Japanese, nice. I want to go over there next year to climb Mt Fuji and to check out the culture. However, finding the motivation to learn the language is proving difficult – It's so foreign.