Customer Reviews

Rosetta Stone V3: Japanese Level 1-3 Set [OLD VERSION]

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Most people would agree that immersion is the best way to learn a language--but let's face it, a lesson spent in front of a computer isn't really immersion. On the flip side, how can you teach a language so different from English without using English to explain the rules? I have to admit, Rosetta Stone Japanese has surpassed my expectations.

Let me spell out where I'm starting from and what I was hoping for, since this kind of product, more than most, will be rated largely depending on your expectations for it. I got interested in learning Japanese about four or five years ago, largely prompted by my pre-teen's interest. We bought some books on kana (the syllabaries), a dictionary, a book on kanji, even a couple of grammar books. And then got overwhelmed. The grammar is SO different, the syllabaries are easy to learn but written kana has no inter-word spacing, so without the familiar "word boundaries" a sentence is just one long string of symbols. We don't know any native Japanese speakers willing to descend to essentially a kindergarten level. And listening to Japanese spoken in movies or trying to read manga? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Fast forward to today. Pretty much all I remember is (part of) one syllabary. A, i, o, something, something, ka, ki, ku, something, ko, sa, shi, su, something, something, ta, ti, no that's not right, shi, tu? uhh ... well, you get the idea. Not much in the way of retention! Just enough, however, to dive right in to Rosetta Stone. Their premise, of course, is that you do all your learning in the target language. There are several mechanisms:

You see a picture, you see a written phrase, you hear it spoken. Repeat it correctly if you can (replay the audio as often as you please).

You see four pictures. You see and hear a phrase. Click the picture it names.

You hear a phrase. Can you choose the correct picture solely by hearing it?

... and so on. There are enough variations on this theme to keep your mind busy. The photos are colorful, attractive, professional (and very multicultural!) There are short lessons focusing on the characters and their sounds, but most of the learning is illustrated with these slick photos.

So, it should be fairly easy to understand how RS teaches vocabulary, pronunciation, even some reading. See a picture, see or hear the word, it's not that hard to learn it. But grammar? Japanese grammar is quite unlike English. The function of words in a sentence is determined, not so much with case and position like English, but rather with helper words called particles. [Subject] wa [direct object] o [verb] is a very simple example. The "wa" means "this is what we're talking about" and the "o" denotes a direct object. Or here's another: in English, we use noun phrases all the time... stringing together nouns where some of them act as adjectives. "Dog house" doesn't mean "dog and house," it means "dog's house;" "girl child" means "child who is a girl." Neither dog nor girl are adjectives, but they're used like adjectives, see? In Japanese, you can do that with the "no" particle, like this: [noun] no [noun].

Now, imagine explaining that without using English!

Well, they do it. You are given the photos and the phrases, and they highlight (with red characters) the parts that are different, or in some cases the parts that are the same. "Onna no ko" is girl child. "Otako no ko" is boy child. "Onna no hito" is woman. "Otoko no hito" is man. After you get familiar with the words for woman, man, boy, girl, you start on sentences like "the woman is eating," "the boy is running." Hey, where did that "wa" come from? Ohh, I see... Then they do simple sentences with direct objects: the boy is reading a book, the woman is drinking tea. The "o" particle makes its appearance. You infer the rules from the examples, just like children do. It's really rather nicely done!

I'm of course in no position to judge the purity or otherwise of the speakers' accents, but they're surely more helpful than reading about vowel sounds in a book. The voice recognition (VR) is adjustable (freer or more strict), although I'm not sure how well that's calibrated. I do know that the very first word you have to pronounce, konnichiwa, has a Japanese N, which is its own syllable--in other words, "ko-n-ni-chi-wa" is a five syllable word, not four--and the VR did NOT pass me when I tried to say it ko-ni-chi-wa (without the extra N). I'm surprised by how comfortable the speaking and listening is becoming--especially since those are my weak areas in language learning. The package comes with a headphone/mic set, by the way, so you don't have to buy one before starting. Don't worry about buying the "audio supplement" version--its CDs are simply repetitions of the phrases you hear in each unit and lesson. I myself don't think they're worth the $$ difference.

On each screen, you have the option to see the kana (syllabary); kanji, the Chinese-based characters; kanji plus furigana, which basically means little hiragana over each kanji to tell you how it's spoken; and (shhh) romaji, which is Englished kana syllables. Try to avoid using the romaji, as nearly everyone says that it's a terrible habit and a habit you'll soon wish you had never started. In this respect, here's my advice: take a day or two to learn the hiragana before you start this program. There are fewer than 50 syllables, and even a rudimentary acquaintance with them will enhance your Rosetta Stone experience A LOT. Jimi's Book of Japanese: A Motivating Method to Learn Japanese (Hiragana) is a cute hiragana book with the bonus of little tidbits of cultural knowledge, and Kana Pict-o-Graphix: Mnemonics for Japanese Hiragana and Katakana is a pocket-sized book with effective memory cues. But back to the screen... whichever type of character display you select will be remembered until you change it again or quit the program. It defaults to kana, which is a sensible decision IMO.

A few other things about the interface: Reading the user guide made it look a lot more complicated than it is. Basically, there aren't too many controls you have to worry about. Just take the path they suggest through the program. I will say, however, that I'm repeating each lesson a few times, because I know my short-term memory is getting shorter every day. One oddity is that it will forward you to Lesson 2, then circle back to pick up some other activities from Lesson 1. They don't explain why, but I suspect this is an attempt at an SRS, Spaced Repetition System, which helps reinforce what you've learned and (in theory anyhow) help move it from short-term to long-term memory. If knowing this disturbs you, you can choose your lesson activities from a complete menu. Do them in any order you please, repeat them as often as you want, you're the boss. But really, you might not even notice that the Lesson 2 path contains Lesson 1 activities. After choosing my own path for a few lessons, I have now settled into their path without a problem. Each activity has a "you are here/navigation" bar at the bottom, showing the number of frames in the activity and which one you're on at the moment. A "grade" icon at bottom right will show you how many you got right and wrong and your percentage. If you revisit an activity, the frames you missed will be colored differently so you can go right to them.

Here's the organization of the whole program: 3 levels > 4 units/level > 4 lessons/unit > 9 activities/lesson. An activity ("listening and reading", "pronunciation," "vocabulary") takes around 10 minutes, sometimes 5, sometimes 15. You can see that there's quite a bit of instruction in this set.

Writing is probably the weakest link in the program. Obviously, Rosetta Stone has judged that the percentage of their users who have graphic tablets or some other touch device is too small to cater to, so "writing" means "looking at pictures of writing." Better than nothing, I guess, but if you picked up a pen and started trying to imitate those characters on paper, you'd probably benefit.

It's far too late to make this long story short, so I'll just say: If you're a beginner who is interested in learning Japanese and willing to dedicate short blocks of time to it on a regular basis, I think you'll really enjoy the Rosetta Stone package.

So that anyone who reads this review understands where I'm coming from, I will just briefly state that I have a bachelors degree in linguistics and have taught myself three languages to the point where I could go and attend fairly advanced (i.e., second-year University-level) courses. I learned two of those languages (Italian and French) using textbooks only, and one (Greek) using audio tapes (although you also have to use the book that comes along with them). I also learned Spanish in junior high school using a textbook that had a fairly intellectual approach -- for example, it explained the difference between the preterit and the imperfect past tenses by looking at events as being cyclical and having us choose the proper tense based on the point in the cycle at which the event occurred. The approach was not for everyone, but I really liked it -- understanding the differences between English and Spanish intellectually help me to avoid him the mistakes most people tend to make in selecting the proper past tense when learning other Indo-European languages. I should also note that I've previously taken about four months of Japanese, although I had forgotten pretty much everything by the time I started this program. I've wanted to study Japanese again, but haven't been too motivated to pick up a text book. So I was quite excited to have been offered this interactive approach through Amazon's Vine program. Is it worth the price, however? That depends on how motivated you are and how you learn best. I'm not crazy about the Rosetta Stone approach, but compared to audio tapes or textbooks, this software is probably more comprehensive for most people.

The main issue I have with Rosetta Stone is that the basic concept of total immersion just doesn't apply and doesn't work. Total immersion would mean living in Japan and being exposed almost exclusively to Japanese during every waking hour. 30 minutes a day, or however long someone is likely to spend using this software, just doesn't count as total immersion. Moreover, the notion that you can learn a new language as an adult the one same way you learned your first language is erroneous. Linguists have managed to discover people who didn't acquire language as children, and while they can learn to speak, they never learn to speak right -- it always sounds off. After the two hemispheres of the brain separate language can't be acquired in the same way. So I found this program really frustrating in that it never explained anything and for a language like Japanese, which differs so extensively from English, I really wanted more explanation, especially regarding the use of particles (see below). Had I not previously studied Japanese I think I would have given up on this. It is, however, really nice having visuals and interactive material. For Japanese, at least, this is something I would use as a supplement to a more traditional program. Here then is a summary of the other pluses and minuses of this program:

PLUSES:

1. Photos: particularly useful for learning nouns and adjectives, although somewhat confusing for other parts of speech where it's hard to interpret what someone in the picture is doing.

2. Mix of activities: the program takes you through pronunciation exercises, vocabulary, grammar and reading and writing and has a nice mix of having you click on pictures that best match the phrase, having you fill in missing sentences, etc. I used the headset and microphone that came with my Dragon Naturally Speaking software and it worked just fine.

3. Nice pacing: each sub lesson is about 30 minutes long, which is really useful for planning out study time. It took me awhile to realize that the lessons don't completely go in order and that you wouldn't get certain things in lesson one until you had already done parts of lesson two. Once I figured that out though, I liked the fact that I could measure my progress by seeing how much easier things in an earlier lesson were after having completed subsequent ones.

MINUSES:

1. VR Software is buggy: the program lets you get away with absolute murder and marks serious mistakes as correct. Totally wrong words are recognized as being right. On the other hand, it often says you've done something incorrectly when you haven't. I mean how can you really screw up making the sound "n"? According to the software, quite a bit.

2. Writing: this is the single most frustrating thing about this program -- it never shows you how to actually write Japanese characters. While I understand there not being any video in this program instead of photographs because of space limitations, they could at least have shown which part of the character to draw in what order and in what direction. My previous Japanese textbook had this and it was extremely helpful. While it's nice that you don't need to have a drawing pad to do this program, it isn't really practice writing when the program shows you a character and has you type out the equivalent English representation of the syllable.

3. Program stalls: sometimes the program just stalls for no apparent reason and it's not my computer. I have more than the minimum requirements and I usually run Rosetta Stone with nothing else in the background. Sometimes the lesson screen just doesn't come up and sometimes it doesn't reset after you've incorrectly said a phrase. Unfortunately this happens frequently enough to make using the program annoying.

4. Long phrases: The program makes you say really long phrases in Japanese from the first lesson. You can skip over the phrases, but it makes for a great deal of annoyance and frustration, which makes it not fun to do.

5. No explanations: personally, for Japanese, I find it useful to know what function all the different particles have in a sentence. I don't know that someone who has never taken this language would figure out that both "wa" and "ga" are subject case markers. I still don't know what the difference between the two is and the immersion approach will never explain it to me. I would prefer having some English explanation available because I find that intellectualizing the syntax a bit is useful. You can learn without these kinds of explanations but it takes a really long time. A combination approach would be so much more effective, at least for adults. Amazon sells at least five different books that deal with nothing but Japanese particles, they are that complicated. Learning them with no explanation is near impossible.

6. Text options: You are able to select in certain cases whether text appears as Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana or Romanji. Annoyingly, however, this option resets itself on every subprogram and not to the one I want.

7. No audio tapes with this version, although since the tapes just repeat the words and phrases from the computer program with no English translation, you probably don't need them unless you are going to spend time in the car or gym or somewhere without computer access practicing. If so, it's worth the additional investment to get the version with the audio CDs.

I will probably and update this review after I've been using a program for a few months. I do know, however, that my Japanese is never going to be even halfway decent unless I also pick up my old textbook and engage in additional study and practice writing the various styles of Japanese characters. If this program could have combined everything it does with some more traditional learning it would be a great program. As it is, it seems more geared towards someone who prefers a loose approach to studying language, rather than someone who seriously wants to learn to speak a foreign language well. My guess is that using this approach along would work better for something like Spanish, Italian or French. For Japanese, it's just okay. But for someone taking a course in Japanese in school, this program would be a brilliant accompaniment and a very worthwhile investment.

I am only 3/4 of the way through the first CD-Rom. This is what i found so far.

PROS:
- I am actually learning how to put sentences together and find myself identifying things i see every day in Japanese.
- The interface is like a great big game of Memory.

CONS:
- This works great for learning simple things like "car", "dog", and numbers. The only problem is when you get into the more complicated things that cannot be explained with a simple picture. EXAMPLE: They show a picture of a man in a car and give you the phrase. You have no way of determining if you are saying "Man in a car", "Man Driving", "This man is driving", "I am driving" etc. etc. I find myself CONSTANTLY going online and typing in the sentence to find what the hell i'm saying.
- the program is a bit glitchy and will not load the next lesson sometimes or the boxes that are supposed to have options to choose from will be empty etc.

OVERALL:
I'm sure this program works wonders for any language that uses the western alphabet (Spanish, French etc.). But when you have to learn to READ and speak the language at the same time it gets tough. I find myself doing it with everything in Romanji (phonetically written in English)first then going BACK and doing it again with the Japanese writing to figure out what it looks like.

This product DOES do what it says. Just don't expect it to be a stand-alone product. You'll need books that teach you how to write as well as read to supplement the lessons. I'm sure if you're already interested in dropping almost $500 that another $40 for the books isn't that big of a deal though.

For someone who has had lifelong difficulties learning languages this program is easy to use and effective. I am mostly interested in understanding and speaking basic Japanese as I will probably be in Japan for a few months. This program is most effective at meeting that goal. I would say the sections that require repeating a whole sentence are the most difficult, and the grammar section that asks you to identify parts of written sentences is still a bit of a mystery to me. The sound has frozen a few times, but rebooting the program solved the problem. That may be more of an issue with my laptop's capabilities. Overall, I think it was worth the money.

I have always wanted to understand Japanese. Rosetta Stone instruction relies upon total immersion, aurally & visually. This is not a program that will work for anyone who wants to learn while driving. One must sit in front of the computer screen and one again learns by hearing the language spoken and seeing images, probably the most basic way most people learn best. Since this methodolgy requires a great deal of time, it is ideal for those seriously interested in comprehending an additional language. When I travel to Japan, I now know that I won't feel totally lost!