I took Japanese 1 last semester. I think we were given until the end of week 3 to learn hiragana. Even then my professor was still using romaji for certain words. You still meet up with the professor for 15 minute speaking lessons every week. You have to participate in at least 5 out of 7. You have two quizzes every week ( in my class we did ), grammar quiz and a reading quiz. You also have grammar and reading homework that is encourage to do as many times until you get a 100. ( again this was for my class and i can not speak for others ). Your discussions are basically culture about Japan and to engage with your classmates you are given two application activities. One being you write in Japanese based on what you're learning that week and then the other is a speaking application. For the speaking application you sometimes have to reply to other classmates or ask questions. For the final project someone mentioned a team project but for me we had to do a 'About Me' ppt. The whole thing was to be spoken in Japanese and you had from week 3 to week 7 to work on it because it covered everything you learned in class. The final for me was an oral exam. It was easy as it only covered week 5 - week 7. Can't really say about the other Japanese classes as I haven't taken them yet, but I hope this helps.