Customer Reviews

TeLL me More Japanese - Beginner, Intermediate & Advanced [Old Version]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am a Japanese teacher at a community college and use this software TeLL me More in my classes. I also recommend it to my students as I believe it is very well structured and the only good software out there. Also, I happen to be Japanese and feel pretty confident talking English, I was very shocked why the other review mentions that Japanese people cannot talk English as I believe I am succesful at doing it, so immersion works!
Also, the speech recognition works great, it can even tell you within a sentence which word you did not pronounce right. I use that part as a a complement of my classes, having all my students sit down in the lab and pronounce the words. Overall, it is a great learning tool

I had been studying Japanese for a while at the time that I bought this program. The reason I got it originally was to use it in improving those parts of the language I had trouble with, which was mostly listening comprehension and talking speed. While it seems to have helped some in this regard (though the fact is that you must eventually speak with actual people to improve this beyond beginner level), I find this software to be lacking in most capacities.
Here is a summation of my experience:
Pro -
Voice recognition seems to work reasonably well.
The program forces you to read lines and pronounce words with swiftness and accuracy (more or less) before giving you a mark of approval.
The puzzles are sometimes entertaining (though who said a language was supposed to be fun to learn).
The program goes up to an intermediate level of Japanese (the point where you start needing to look at materials beyond textbooks).
There is quite a bit of useful vocabulary and some interesting videos.

Cons -
The program seems to be a bit buggy. It won't work on Windows 7 unless run in compatibility mode and it has sometimes failed to play the voice recording while in a vocal exercise.
The program is poorly arranged, so a beginning student without some idea of where to start would probably be lost.
The user will undoubtedly need supplemental instruction.

In summary, this is not a very good program in my opinion. There are much better ways to learn Japanese and I would recommend putting the money one might spend on this program towards taking a class and picking up some good instructional books and audio CDs.

Overall, I liked the software and felt as if I learned a little from it. Although upon starting the software, I was confused as far as where I should start. It give me no indication of what I should do in order or how to proceed.

I have a slightly different version (DELUXE v2.0), but reading one of the reviews, it looks like there are no appreciable differences. Fortunately for me, it was cheap.

My main complaint is the terrible interface. It's impossible to figure out where to begin. You try doing the "dialogue", and it starts talking at you in japanese and asks you to pick an appropriate response, which is impossible unless you have already studied Japanese enough to understand what they are saying. The other modes are similar. There is a "Reference" mode, which rushes through all of the grammatical rules way too fast for you to actually learn anything. You can't even look anything up unless you already know how to write and read the Japanese character sets. It doesn't show the romanzied version of words. There's a non-functional "Video" icon in my version too.

So it won't work for beginners because it doesn't actually teach you anything. MAYBE if you already knew some Japanese and wanted to test your knowledge, it would be good. I was hoping it would help me integrate knowledge of written with spoken Japanese, but that doesn't seem to be working out. Oh well. At least I didn't pay $175 for it.

I had to buy this program (at a cheap price, thank goodness) to go along with the online Japanese course I took through an out-of-state community college. (Trying to find a college near me that teaches Japanese was impossible.) I can already speak Japanese, but I was taking the course because I never got college credit for my Japanese and never learned to read kanji. I was very disappointed with Tell Me More. First of all, to go anywhere in the program, you are staring at a picture and clicking on different elements in the picture that will take you to different parts of the program. I had to keep going back to the manual to try to look up which thing in the picture takes you to which part of the program. Who decided to get cutesie with that? Just give me a text menu. Good grief! Secondly, many times when I tried to respond to questions, the program said it couldn't understand me. I slowed the program down, but I'm no novice when it comes to speaking Japanese and even though I spoke as fast as I could, it still often didn't give me time to finish my response before it said it couldn't understand me. Anyone who advocates computer programs for learning a foreign language over one-on-one interaction with a live teacher is out of their mind. People totally new to the language are going to speak very slowly and this program doesn't seem to give them time to respond. Since I can already speak Japanese, I often skip the instructions for using Tell Me More and focus on the kanji part of the lesson. Buyer beware!

Bought this product over the internet for ~190$ and got it today. As stated in other Tell me more language program reviews(the bad ones which I agree with), this program has zero guidance in lesson planning, horrible interface that you have to figure out, and what's further disturbing, function buttons that do not work. i.e., the Video portion of my beginner's cd HAD NO VIDEOS! The "advanced speech recognition" is a total joke. Unless you have the same exact voice as the narrator, you probably can't get a single pronunciation correct enough for the computer to understand(and I tried messing with the settings and know my pronunciation is not bad, because I've been to Japan and my sister in law is Japanese). It seems that all the helpful lessons(and they aren't that helpful) rely on this speech recognition, which means you'll be continually frustrated yelling into the mike to try to get the program to go to the next question. It includes absolutely no foundation for absolute beginners, which leaves the student swimming about trying to get a handle on the program and the lessons. The included manual and culture guide are both jokes with no relevance at all to the most important reason why this program was supposed to have been written, to teach the Japanese Language. The free included headset is a cheap piece of plastic that immediately started giving me a headache because it would not fit. The reference section of the software is like a couple chapters copied from a Japanese Grammar book that you could get for $5 in a used book shop except slower; I mean literally, it is grammar rules written out for you on the computer screen. The crazy thing is that reference guide seemed to be pretty much the only thing that worked on the program as I expected, but why would you pay 175$ for that!?! The rest of the program might be useful if you have other books that have taught you the fundamentals, but then again, if you have those other books, this program will offer you nothing better than what those other books can offer you, hence making itself totally useless.
The box of the software program promises tools to learn all this and that. None of it was true.
If you want to learn any language, I recommend the Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, and getting a couple good manga, and a small dictionary, and when you feel confident in being able to communicate in everyday situations, open up a piece of literature and start dogging away at it one word at a time. Learning grammar points is NOT learning a language! Nor is learning vocab. words!
This program was zero help and I would NEVER buy an Auralog product again. This 175$ piece of &*%^ was worse than most 9.99$ software in the clearance bins of electronics shops.
The box also says that the Japanese Language Institute or something like that helped make this program. Well, consider that all the Japanese pretty much start learning English around the fifth grade and learn English until they die, and 99.9% of them still can not speak a word of English beyond "hello," and even that with horrid pronunciation and you come quickly to realize that the Japanese language institutes are NOT good role models for teaching/learning any language. Believe me, I've taught/tutored English in Japan and Korea. This software title is like their learning institutions, all rote memorization that jumps subjects and topics with no grounding while offering no incentive for the student to want to learn. There's zero technique and zero repetition, and ZERO thought in the execution of this product. Hence I would have liked to give the review 0 stars but of course 1 star was the least I could give.

This is perfect for my Japanese studying. It has all of the levels I need. I love this Japanese software! Gambatte kudasai ne!

OUTSTANDING PROGRAM. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN COMMUNICATING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE IS PRONUNCIATION. THE AURALOG VOICE RECOGNITION IS STATE OF THE ART.