okay I looked it up in my handy dandy kanji dictionary, your title says "I among boiling" (boku waku ma) Is this what you meant? I also looked up a possible reading of this(being spoken) as boku wa kuma, is this what you were trying to say?

Also for the listening thing... it takes time. I can not hear what native people are saying sometimes (but I also probably only know a couple hundred words). My girlfriend says it usually takes a couple years to hear like a native and a couple more to speak like one.

My opinion about the chinese is that its harder. Japanese has katakana and hiragana, so you can spell out the words you don't know. But in chinese they have only kanji so its much more difficult to write. Oh yea and to speak chinese... there are like 8 tonal levels to speak on, japanese only has 2.