czech language intensive

Oy veh.
Czech is very, very hard. Apparently there are just certain sounds that it takes 3-4 years to learn how to say them correctly (if you've never studied a slavik language before). Cool - I have 4 months. Every day this week and all next week we've had class from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. (hour for lunch). Then there are excursions around the city and such. I really want to learn the language, but am feeling rather overwhelmed about it at this point. I just get the feeling that at the end of this semester I'll still be at the point where I just memorize phrases, without actually understanding the grammar or how the language is put together. Whenever our class asks our teacher about grammatical structure, she says "it's too complicated for now, you will learn it later." Really, though, there are like 7 cases so I'm sure as soon as you start doing grammatical work it just goes deeper and deeper and gets increasingly complicated.
The CIEE study center is located in Vyšehrad, which used to be a fortress back in old old prague. It's on the top of this giant hill, and if I walk about three minutes from the building I have an amazing view of prague and the river. Prague is full of really wonderful public art - beautiful statues, really interesting sculpture - even the graffiti is artistic in a lot of places. I'm used to being a little put off by public art, but here I find myself really liking most of it, and pausing to get a more thorough look.
Most overwhelming place in Prague: Tesco. It's this huge supermarket/everthing store. There are two: one in the center (near the charles bridge, the oldest part of prague) and one across the river. Some flatmates and I went to the one across the river a few days ago, because it's bigger and we thought it would be good to know how to get there etc. Grocery shopping in czech makes me feel like my eyes are going to fall out, head explode, or both. Hopefully it will get easier...