Review of Rosetta Stone Version 3: Japanese Level 1, 2 & 3 Set with Audio Companion:
Best instruction you're going to find outside of a personal tutor.
By Mr. Eddie (New York, NY)
I think that this is a superior way to learn Japanese compared to slaving over the "Genki" JapanTimes curriculum or other homeschool options. These lessons can be monotonous but at the same time you really wind up learning the intricacies of conversational Japanese. My wife is fluent and has been impressed with how I can express myself simply but effectively.
This reinforcement approach is particularly useful regarding essential grammatical concepts which your mind is better off just getting the hang of as compared to reading in a book. Particularly with Japanese & its particles -- plus the fact that it is such a "phonetically poor" language, one needs to hear native speakers and their emphasis as much as possible.
My only complaint about the Rosetta Stone course thus far:
It is a little TOO much based on repetition of the same pictures and phrases; interactivity could be more advanced. By the time you reach the "milestone" tests it can be a bit daunting with the complete immersion in real-world language confrontations. In other words, I routinely get 100% on the lessons until the final one where I get an 80%. That's a bit frustrating. And because there is only a single milestone test per unit, you only get one shot to strut your stuff -- if you retake it you will remember the answers and thus not be truly tested on your weak areas.
I don't think the program should be so sheepish about verbal drilling as not to offend one's "grade". It might be a bit humbling but also speed up the learning curve. People learn by making mistakes. But Rosetta Stone is really onto something here; with increased interactivity, maybe even the program being able to detect specific weak spots in a student's responses, this technique will be even better.
As a testament to how highly I think about this product -- it utterly surpasses the UCLA Extension language course I took for a semester (although that was in Latin). Yes it was good to have a teacher to answer grammar questions and the rest, but more often than not her answers just wound up going over our heads and we were better off just plugging away and making little mistakes here and there. I am now a firm believer that you should not over-intellectualize learning a new language; immersion is the key.
(Incidentally, this was an item that became available through the Amazon Vine program, and as such now has many reviewers who obtained it for free, drove it around the block, and wrote relatively superficial reviews. I cannot believe that all of these others have spent the 40-50 hours that I have with the program. Japanese is a very complicated subject that requires a lot of dedication, and is not for the faint of heart.)
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