Customer Reviews

Japanese I, Comprehensive: Learn to Speak and Understand Japanese with Pimsleur Language Programs

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

A lot of people try to state that they learned a lot or a little, but not what they actaully learned. I just finished this course, here's a quick rundown of the contents:

*Present tense of quite a few verbs, including those for shopping, saying where you are going and staying, eating and drinking, where things are or aren't, what you want and don't want, what you can and can't do, and who you are doing things with. You learn them in present tense, a very simple form of the future tense, and they introduce the past tense in the second to last lesson. Asking questions is emphasised in this course, you do it almost as much as you answer them.

*You learn few nouns other than those needed to use the verbs; it feels like they made a point to not include a lot of nouns. You will learn the words for your immediate family, beer/wine/sake and some other random nouns like "hat". This is the biggest drawback to the program, but it is easily overcome by a good set of vocab lists.

*Also, very few adjectives. Big, small, expensive, fast, far away are among the few. You learn how to say "too" fast/expensive. But you learn how to use them very well, so it would be easy to add more with the aid of a dictionary.

*You spend a lot of time talking about money. How much you have, how much you need, vocab for currency exchanges and shopping. You also learn the numbers 1 to 199. And, weirdly enough, you learn how to ask people for money.

*You learn how to talk about your car, including how to ask for gas and how to give and take directions.

*In the last couple lessons, you learn how to ask what words mean in English and how to say words in Japanese.

*You learn how to talk about time and tell time. How long you've been somewhere and how long you plan on staying, and you do it in days, hours, and weeks. Also, you learn the words for yesterday, today, tomorrow, and morning, night.

*"You learn how to ask why and answer "It's because..."

Overall, the vocabulary is extremely polite, I don't imagine this is the way good friends talk to each other. I have already done the second course in Russian, and they introduce more informal vocab in the second series. (I have done the first series in Russian, German, and Japanese, and the things you learn are the same each lesson in each language.)

Even if the subjects are a little touristy, you are still learning how to use verbs and particles much quicker than with other courses. Once you get the structure of the language down, it's relatively easy to add the vocab for what you want to talk about.

Overall, this is a *huge* amount of information to pack into thirty lessons. I also recommend either pausing so you have time to answer, rewinding so that you can catch something you got wrong and/or listening to the more difficult lessons twice.

I hope this is helpful, this is what I was looking for when I read the reviews, and was surprised no one had done this.

I'm a Japanese, have listened to Pimsleur courses in English, which I found very interesting and useful. I have listened only to sample tracks of the Japanese course and I am not here to evaluate it, the 4 stars above are dummy. However, since someone suspected that the female speaker may not be Japanese native, I'd like to write my impressions here.

Well, the woman's voice sounds a little bit peculiar indeed, but it does not sound accented as Chinese or any foreigner. I think her intonation is too flat even by Japanese standards and each word is a bit too strongly articulated, which reminds me of Japanese old-fashioned voices of radio announcers we sometimes hear in historical recordings.

So don't worry, friends. The pronunciation is passable after all. The mode of intonation in Japanese differs greatly by dialects, genders, and generations. In particular, the difference between manly and womanly intonation may be very important, tremendously so in certain situations, but too subtle to learn easily. For this matter, the (too) neutral intonation of the woman's voice, sounding a bit like electronically synthesized one though, may be rather not so bad to avoid unnessesary misunderstandings. I mean, you can safely speak like her regardless of your gender.

Hope this helps.

Atually, I would give it 4 1/2 stars, but that is not possible. It's not perfect (but then, what is?) My wife and I (kanai to watashi) are going to visit Japan in a few months and we wanted to get a basic working knowledge of the language. I though we really would be missing too much if we didn't know any Japanese.

After going through several audio courses (some spoke so fast we were about ready to give up in complete despair), I found Pimsleur and this course has been by far the best of any. Yes, they are expensive, but the quality is far superior to others and generally the teaching speed is about right (although by the end of the first set and the start of the 2nd set), the pace really picks up. Sometimes, phrases are not repreated, which is frustrating, but all in all, it's very good. We found that we can actually have some simple conversations in Japanese - pretty amazing for two people who didn't know a word a few months ago.

I would recommend though that if at all possible, make it a point to get a good Japanese/English dictionary and also a good grammar book. "Japanese for Busy People" is excellent. Both of us are "visual people" and we need the reinforcement of the written word. We're also doing reading in Romanji - maybe technically not the "correct way", but then again it will be "close enough." Maybe our accent won't be quite right, but so what. Does it matter that much? At least we are making the effort and trying to do our best.

Other reviewers also have the right idea when they recommend "practice, practice." In the car is fine, but wait until after you have heard the lesson at least once before. It's too hard and dangerous to try to "get it" the first time while driving. I also try to conduct simple dialogs in my head while at work, doing other things and so on.

We also wish we could practice and learn with a real Japanese native speaker, but with us living in a rural area, that is unfortunately not possible, so this is the next best thing.

Finally, get a few books on Japanese culture and history. You really need those to give you the proper foundation as why the language is structured in certain ways. Besides, the cultural and historical studies should be fascinating in their own right and it does seem to be much point in visiting a country if one is missing the cultural background. This is especially true for a country with customs so different from our own.

Once we get to Japan, we'll see if all this hard work was worth it. Sayonara!

I have gone through the complete Pimsleur series for several European languages --- Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Greek (only Level 1 available). I have supplemented these with the Ultimate Italian, Portuguese, etc. material (book only, not the CD) from Living Language because I want a more systematic presentation of the grammar than Pimsleur gives. Also Just Listen 'N Learn from Passport Books (now McGraw Hill) and the Take Off In series from Oxford University Press, in order to expand my vocabulary. I go through each Pimsleur lesson at least twice the first time through, with lots of use of the pause button and backspace button on my player. And when when I've finished one level, I go back to the beginning and listen to it all over again. With this preparation, I was able to travel in Greece and Italy and briefly in Portugal (which of course required a readjustment from the Brazilian form of the language) and even have friendly conversations with some people who spoke little or no English.

But the Pimsleur method doesn't work as well for Japanese as it does for European languages. You will certainly learn a lot of Japanese, but you won't speak Japanese.

This is a review for all three levels of the Pimsleur Japanese. The Pimsleur materials provide a good starting point. I would never try to learn any language without starting with Pimsleur. (I haven't tried Rosetta Stone. I did eventually get the Linguaphone series for Japanese, which is forty years old and completely dreadful.)

There are two big problems with the Pimsleur approach to Japanese: vocabulary and grammar. Five hundred words just doesn't take you as far in Japanese as it does in European languages. For instance, in European languages you learn the words for family members down to nieces, nephews, and cousins. In Japanese, you learn only husband, wife, son, and daughter. (No, not even father and mother.) The difficulty is that there are separate words for older brother/sister and younger brother/sister. Furthermore, the words you use for talking about your own family (to outsiders) are different from the ones you use for talking about someone else's family. In some cases this difference is minor, but in other cases totally different words are used.

As far as grammar goes, at first it seems like Japanese grammar is very simple. Unlike Russian or German, nouns are not declined. For most nouns, the plural form is identical to the singular. First and second person pronouns (I, you) are most often omitted. Verbs have no conjugation by person: whether the subject is I, you, we, he, she, they, the verb form doesn't change at all. All verbs apparently end in "mas" (usually "imas," sometimes "emas"). To make a verb negative, you just add "sen" at the end. And there are in principle only two tenses, often called the past and the non-past (present and future). (Actually, there is a sort of separate future sense used when one is not absolutely certain about the statement one makes about the future. This is the "desho" form of the verb. It's a little like the distinction in English between "Tomorrow I go to New York" and "Tomorrow it will rain.") The verb system is extremely systematic. Most textbooks say that there are only three irregular verbs (to come, to do, and to be), although a handful of other verbs have slight irregularities in certain forms. You can buy a book called 501 Japanese Verbs, but I don't know quite why anyone would feel the need for it, except to learn the vocabulary.

But in fact the verb system is quite difficult, because there are an incredible number of endings. For instance, there is no word for "if" in Japanese; instead, there's a conditional form of the verb. And when you say, "I want to eat," there's no verb for "I want"; instead, you use the "desirative" form of "eat." And when you say, "Harry wants to eat," it's a completely different verb form. Consequently, the Pimsleur Japanese doesn't cover nearly as many grammar points in Japanese as it does with European languages. For instance, the passive voice isn't taught at all. Relative clauses ("the man who was here yesterday") are not covered at all. They are very simple in Japanese, but very confusing for someone who speaks English.

Pimsleur is based on two principles that just don't work as well for Japanese as for European languages. First, there is no systematic presentation of the grammar. One learns grammar by learning model sentences. And second, one learns only sentences that one would actually use in a business or touristic context, rather than contrived sentences such as "The pen of my aunt is on the table."

One consequence is that everything one learns is in the mode of formal speech (in contrast to "plain" speech). Formal speech is in fact the only way you will ever speak in Japan, unless you acquire a Japanese lover or very good friend. The problem is though that in the first place, the whole Japanese verb system is based on the plain (informal) mode, so it's hard to learn if you start with the formal form of verbs. (This is the form that ends in "mas.") Secondly, even in completely formal speech you need to very frequently use the informal form of verbs whenever a sentence contains more than one clause. In fact, these Pimsleur sentences contain lots of verbs in the informal mode. And this is very confusing since it's much easier to derive the formal form from the informal than vice-versa, so you frequently wind up thinking, "Where the hell did that verb come from?" Second, when used in a sentence, the informal form of the verb is usually wrapped up in a package of little particles and other words, all of which sounds like one very long word. So it's very difficult to learn the verb itself. To a large extent these extra little additions are softeners, to make sure that what one says doesn't come out as overly confrontational. It's as if one says in English, "The thing is, you know, I would sort of, like, prefer to go another day." As I say, this mostly comes out as one long word.

So start with Pimsleur, yes. But you're going to need to follow up with lots more books and tape sets (the iPod Japanese series, JapanesePod101.com, is very good, and a lot of fun) and probably some real live courses before you have any useful knowledge of Japanese. (I'm still in the beginning stages myself, and not sure to what extent I really want to continue with Japanese.)

I have used more the one audio coarse of the last several years in my attempts to learn Japanese. Most are what I would call parrot tapes, they give you a phrase in English then have you repeat it a couple of time in Japanese and thats all they do. While that might work for simple phrases that a tourist might need in a pinch when they can't find a English speaker it doesn't really teach you the language.

The Pimsleur series on the other hand actually teaches you about the language, how verbs are modified etc. Each lesson not only teaches you what to say but also starts to training your ear to listen to Japanese. It does this through a series of question and answers with immediate reinforcement. For example they introduce how to say good morning have you repeat that a couple of times then will ask you how do you say good morning and then will say good morning. Then they will go on to other concepts or word but just when you think they may have forgotten about good morning they ask you to say it again. These memory reinforcements come close together when you have first learned a phrase and then get farther and farther apart as the lessons progress.

Now some people have complained that the the Japanese speakers that they use for the lesson are not native speakers. Of course my question is if you are needing a entry level course in Japanese how in the heck can you tell if the speaker is native or not. I had a acquaintance from one of my college classes listen to one on the later lessons from the course and he said while the lady's "dialect" was a bit different sounding to him he wouldn't say she was a non-native speaker.

Overall the Pimsleur Japanese I course is great introduction to the language and probably would be enough for a tourist traveling to Japan. It is not however the only method you should rely on to learn Japanese, it is solely a language course and does not cover the written language. It is however one the easiest way to start acquiring a language that I have found so far and I would not hesitate to recommend it to some with no exposure to Japanese as a great introduction to the language. I hope to be able to get the second and third courses to the set and use them to help supplement my efforts to learn the language.

I spent about a 40 days on the Level One tape, listening to each lesson. My process was to:

- Try to listen to a lesson each day
- Review the last half a previous lesson if I found it was difficult.
- Pause the tape frequently and try to say the sentence in Japanese before listening to the answers (I took 45min to an hour on each lesson this way)
- Don't write anything down! Weird but I've got a tendency NOT to memorize or recall things if I have them written down.

I've got to say the Level One tape gives a good grounding in sentence structure and grammar. Not a lot of vocabulary (I recommend unforgettablelanguages.com for that). Still, if I'd just borrowed a book from the library and spent as much time on it as I did listening to these tapes, it'd be cheaper and I'd get the same material out of it. :)

The real PRO of this tape lies in its repetitiveness and mobility. Reading a textbook would make me want to go to sleep.

I remember about 98% of what I listened to. The 2% has to do with word placement in a sentence... I still mix up those de's and ni's. Doh.

To begin, a few comments to set the tone of this review... Yes, it is very expensive. Yes, it is audio only (which is the point). Yes, there is no explanation of the Japanese syllabaries. Yes, it is worth every penny.

Japanese I (3rd Edition) teaches you how to speak Japanese as a child would. When children are learning in the home, they are not assaulted from all angles with text books and written explanations. They learn by listening. Then, later in life, things like how to write the language they already know, and learning the reasoning behind the grammar picked up through speaking, all fall into place. As an adult, you can take extra advantage of this because of our enhanced ability to reason, and make deductions on what we already know.

This first level of the Pimsleur Japanese course focuses mostly on simple and essential phrases you will need to know to get around in Japan. You learn greetings, how to convey your mastery (or lack thereof) of the language, how to get to and from important places, counting (and money), and so on. Each lesson has a simple and logical progression, teaching you new things and then building upon the usage of what you just learned. The lessons also flow into each other, and usually have several minutes of review at the beginning of each one. They also make a point of bringing words you haven't used in a few lessons back into fresh memory by incorporating them into the new material you are learning. 100% mastery of each lesson is not necessary, as nearly everything you learn is reinforced repeatedly in following lessons. Being able to answer in about 80% of the situations is a more realistic goal. It is important to only do one lesson per day, although that one lesson can be reviewed repeatedly during the same day. Also, note taking or transcribing what you are hearing is discouraged as it will actually undermine the method used in this course.

So, I wholeheartedly recommend this course. It does exactly what it claims to do, which is help you learn to speak Japanese. If you are looking to do more than just speak the language, I still recommend this product, as hearing native speakers is invaluable. A few points to consider on your quest for fluency... It has become accepted among many modern educators that learning the kana (the syllable based writing of Japanese) as early as possible can make learning Japanese much easier. Knowing the kana helped me avoid thinking of the things I was learning in this course "in English", and instead I could visualize the words spelled out in Japanese in my head. This extra immersion was very helpful. The "readings" (extra audio to be listened to after the lessons) are also nice for insight into cultural differences and grammar in Japan. All in all, an excellent product!

My wife says the only real way for a Non-Japanese speaker to completely learn Japanese is to live in Japan. My wife (Watashi no Tsuma) being Japanese herself speaks volumes for the accuracy of her statement. Unfortunately we will not be able to move to Japan for a few years. Meanwhile I need to establish strong Japanese speaking and listening skills. For a while I was focusing on all the wrong things. I was sure that memorizing Kanji was the way to go. I can now recognize a lot of Kanji but was unable to even carry on a decent conversation with my Mother in law (giri no haha). Then I thought I would master the Kanas and be able to read everything I saw. Well, that certainly did not work because of the massive use of Kanji and difficulty in getting native like pronunciation. Then I turned to the Pimsleur series. It starts you out a very basic level. The strongest aspect is that you are immediately immersed into a conversational environment with three participants, yourself and two speakers. Everything moves in steps and you reuse everything that you learn. I have never once just listened to a single lessson only once. My new routine is to listen to a lesson in the morning while driving to work (I know this sounds crazy but I actually used to take notes while driving -- my Wife put an end to that). Then during lunch I listen again taking notes for new words (I know they say not to but it really helps me). Finally I listen on the way home. If by the time I get home I feel like I have 90-95% of it, I will start the next lesson the next day. I have recently started doing lessons on the weekend too. I am on lesson 41 now and I will get to lesson 90.

Results. My Wife, Wife's friends, Mother-in-Law and Sister-in-Law are all very impressed at how much I have improved. I drive my wife nuts asking her all kinds of questions like, is the "Yasumi" in "Yasumi wo torimasu" the same as the "Yasumi" in "O Yasumi Nasai". At times she wishes her Mother was here so I would have someone to speak with who's English abilities are very basic.

Process. I highly suggest you turn the CDs into MP3s. That way you can store them on an iPod (which is what I have done, I turned an old iPod Mini into my traveling Nihongo Device). Additionally I have them on my laptop for the lunch time review. You must practice, practice, practice and practice. I talk to myself all the time in Japanese. I speak to my co-workers (doryo) in Japanese even though they have no idea what I am saying. I speak to my Dog in Japanese, I think she might understand some.

Pimsleur is fantastic. I took a peek at some other languages in the program and to my surprise they are almost exactly the same. They start with, "Do you speak English?", etc. Whenever I get to a strong Japanese level I want to check out French and Dutch.

Ok so the bottom line. If you are not sure about spending this much for a lesson tool you should consider going to your local library and seeing if they have it first. Chances are they may have it available via NetLibrary. Try listening to the WMA protected version to get a feel for what it is like. Trust me, if you are serious about learning Japanese or any other language you WILL find Pimsleur essential.

Gambate (Good Luck)

I've bought tons of Japanese-learning material, both book and software, and most of it at least partially disappointing regardless of price point. Pimsleur, despite its lofty hype and even loftier cost(!), is no different. It's ok, but it's not the holy grail that most reviews would have you think it is, with my own reasons summed up thus:

1) You don't learn as much as you think you do. Yes, the method is sound, with the interspersed repetition and gradual introduction of new material, but the actual amount of language knowledge attained by the end of it is a LOT lower than one would hope.

2) The method (any method, in fact) NEEDS written material. I know it is a "selling point" of Pimsleur that it is audio-only, but in fact the course narration and design subtly discourage the student FROM writing things down or using other written material in conjunction with the course. I won't belabor the "why" since it's just plain common sense, but the bottom line is that some written material helps learning. Period. These courses are in bad need of some quality manuals/workbooks/whatever.

3) The speakers aren't very good. On Pimsleur I, for example, the female doesn't sound native in her pronounciation, and the male speaks WAY too quickly...ridiculously so! It's one thing to speak at a natural speed to get the ear "used" to what one hears in a natural Japanese conversation, but when the speaker speaks so fast that he practically mumbles half-sentences, that's an entirely different story. Despite everything else, this was my single biggest beef with these products, and lest the importance of this shortcoming escape you, remember that this is pretty much an all-audio course(!). The quality control on such a fundamental aspect of the product is pathetic.

4) The cost is way, WAY too high. Successful (and not successful) as this method may be, you know that it's too expensive before you even buy it, hype-to-high-heaven notwithstanding. Take my word, it's simply not worth the insane price. It is simply not THAT much better than other available material that it's worth spending several factors more for. If you're able to get it for less, then yes, you'll get some learning value out of it, but bear in mind the above points...it is very over-hyped, and even more over-priced.

The method used in these CDs allows you to pick up basic sentences without ever studying a book. You will progress a lot faster if you do, but I think these CDs are great if you want to listen to them in the car or on the bus. The price is insane, though - especially considering that one set of CDs only takes you as far as the first three or four lessons in most textbooks. Do not forget there are libraries in most cities...