普通话

I started taking Mandarin classes about a month ago. We do like 4-5 hours every week, plus the time each person spends studying at home, which, in my case, isn't a lot (Law books are time suckers).

However, my classmates seem to be very obtuse, and our teacher has decided to adapt to their dumbness and slow down her rhythm until a point I feel like I'm wasting my time.

I'd like to make some progress by myself, but I'm really lost as to what should I do from now. Yes, I could study hanzi like a madman, but I don't think learning random words would be useful at all. What about grammar, for example? Common phrases? Well, hopefully you'll be able to give me a hand.

Also, if, by coincidence, any Chinese student is learning Spanish as well and needs some help with the language of Cervantes, this native speaker will be more than glad to help him/her (wait... no girls, internet, etc) out.

Cheers.

Actually, you'd be surprised by how beneficial learning a bunch of random words can be.  I would highly recommend doing so, or grabbing yourself some flashcards, especially ones used for the different HSK levels (Chinese Proficiency Test / Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng kǎoshì / 汉语水平考试). This will put you worlds ahead.  There are also social networking sites out there with about 5 billion Chinese people wanting to improve their English and willing to help you with your Chinese, those have proved extremely useful to me in better understanding real conversational Chinese and common grammatical constructs/vocab.

I highly recommend this website:
http://www.xuezhongwen.net/chindict/chindict.php

That one is the best online Chin/Eng dictionary, plus has a whole bunch of other mighty useful features including the aforementioned HSK flashcards.