Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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229 of 236 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great product (as long as you like the immersion approach), December 7, 2002
This software is designed around the immersion approach to learning languages. A drill will show you a picture of an apple, and you'll see the word spelled out while a narrator gives the pronunciation. At various points in the drills, you will have the chance to read the Japanese word for apple, use your logic and language skills to pick the picture for apple after hearing the word in Japanese, and more. Its target audience is the self-motivated learner who's serious about learning and mastering basic Japanese over a 1-2 year period. Anyone looking for a quick and useful phrases for a short visit to Japan should use the Rosetta Stone Explorer or Traveller programs instead of this set. That said, using the Rosetta Stone is a lot cheaper than a plane ticket to Japan, or the tuition fees at intense summer Japanese courses at various universities around the US. If you master all the drills and vocabulary in the program, you will be well equipped to go to Japan, and to continue learning the language in an immersion environment.The student who has headphones and microphone attached to his or her PC will be able to take advantage of all the listening, reading, speaking and writing drills in the program. Users can switch back and forth between the romanized, hiragana and kanji scripts. Your Japanese teacher may not have the time (or patience) to give you individualized, repetitive drills. That's not a problem with this program - you can practice all you like and the program will never get tired of you! As such, the program is a good supplement for people formally enrolled in a class. For the student who dislikes the immersion approach and prefers to learn Japanese scripts and grammar before tackling any listening or reading, I recommend the Power Japanese and Kanji Moments programs from Bayware software. Once you have completed the Rosetta Stone programs, you will still need some formal study of grammar, but this program covers basic principles like the subject-object-verb order characteristic of Japanese, and basic verb forms. I used the online version of RS Japanese, and was extremely happy with it, but only because I have very high-speed internet access. Once my use license expired, I could no longer access the programs. If I had the CDs, I'd always be able to refer to the program later. Take your pick based on your own personal convenience. I liked my RS Japanese experience so much, that I took the plunge and bought the Level 1 Korean edition on CD.
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162 of 166 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
a fair associative study, but hardly the best option available, January 29, 2006
I've been living in Japan for almost three years now and have been trying hard to learn the language independently. After hearing about it here and there, I decided to purchase the double-pack of Rosetta Stone's Japanese software a year and a half ago. Based upon the U.S. State Department's sworn-by language study program, Rosetta Stone gets a lot of hype (and a fair bit of advertising) for its effectiveness. For a language as thoroughly dissimilar from English as Japanese, however, it comes up a bit short.
While I used it almost daily for a few months after purchasing it - mostly out of discipline - I've found it doing little more than taking up hard drive space recently. Certainly it teaches a lot of vocabulary across its many lessons, and the methodology - likened to that of a child's language acquisition - has its merits in theory. Unfortunately, the design of the software makes it entirely too easy to remember words and phrases without ever producing them yourself. Unlike the Pimsleur programs, which constantly force you to speak and apply what you have learned, Rosetta Stone is too oriented around associative reaction. The pictures are static (and frequently of poor, grainy quality), resulting in the user recognizing single images more than actual words and concepts.
For solely building vocabulary, this sort of methodology works to an extent. But, as any student of Japanese can tell you, it isn't the kind of language where you can just throw words together in hopes of forming an understandable sentence. Anyone familiar with the stereotype of Japanese-English being oft-incomprehensible? There's a reason for this: the way Japanese grammar functions is completely different from that of English. Any attempt to directly translate something will just result in puzzled looks. Rosetta Stone will not teach you a wink of grammar, so when you encounter things like comparatives, you won't have a clue WHY they're expressed that way nor even what each component exactly means. For any language student that likes an even slightly analytical approach, this aspect is extremely off-putting.
The software gives you the option of seeing the text in romaji, kana or kanji. Romaji is, of course, a cinch, but the others are unintelligible to complete beginners as the program will not teach you how to read them. So, in the very least, you will have to purchase a kana text to learn hiragana or katakana; relying on romaji is usually discouraged by most Japanese language students and educators. As for the kanji option, well, there's no furigana, so you'd best not bother. By the time you could actually read it, you probably wouldn't learn anything new from this software anyhow.
A noble effort, and perhaps one that works well for Indo-European languages, but frankly Rosetta Stone's not worth the expense. If you do get it, expect to supplement it heavily with other materials as you will *not* become fluent (or, arguably, even comprehensible) from this. The Pimsleur series is a good, if pricey, start and texts like the Japanese For Busy People series (preferably with accompanying cds) and James W. Heisig's Remembering the Kana & Remembering the Kanji are much more comprehensive. Ganbatte!
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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Stay away if you're actually wanting to LEARN the Japanese language, January 3, 2006
As others have stated, you listen to a speaker say a word in Japanese and have to match up what they say with one of four pictures. This is all fine and good for words like boy, apple, dog etc. However the same process is repeated for sentences; where you are left to recognize words within the sentence just to make a guess at which of the four pictures is correct. They give a PDF file that has the translation of those sentences in English, but this DOES NOT help with learning the Japanese equivalent.
English sentence structure is Subject Verb Object, while Japanese is Subject Object Verb. This means you can only make a guess at what exactly is the Japanese equivalent of the English translation given to you.
You are NEVER taught any grammar, sentence structure, or Kanji/Hiragana/Katakana!
Basically you are better off buying a cheap phrase book, which is basically what this program is. If you want to learn Japanese this is NOT going to help you in the least.
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