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RosettaStone
bowen
Sup?Registered User regular
Sup?Registered User regular
So, my g/f and I are looking to learn Japanese. My end goal is to be fluent even for traveling and reading, her end goal is to be fluent enough to understand Anime. I've tried the book route and that tends to be horrible. I haven't had much luck getting past "Hi."
We looked into RosettaStone (holy shit are you expensive), and it seems promising. Is this a good idea? Is there better ideas? We don't have the possibility of taking classes and would just like to do this on our own time. I see they have 3 levels. I'm not really sure where to go or what to do.
Am I stupid to spend $500 on it?
We looked into RosettaStone (holy shit are you expensive), and it seems promising. Is this a good idea? Is there better ideas? We don't have the possibility of taking classes and would just like to do this on our own time. I see they have 3 levels. I'm not really sure where to go or what to do.
Am I stupid to spend $500 on it?
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
bowen on
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I take it you used it?
Regardless of which path you choose, you should definitely use Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese alongside. It offers a very practical overview of the language.
I'm definitely thinking about picking up the book. I have a few books atm but they are absolutely terrible like I said.
I notice in some books they go after romanji and kanji and a few other written dialects. I assume I want to focus on kanji? (romanji has kinda of fallen out of practice since unicode hasn't it?)
My recommendation? Use RosettaStone in conjunction with another more rigorous method. They are right, the RS method does help you associate words and images more naturally without the translation step, and with something to boost the grammar and structure side of things, you should be good.
Seriously though, Rosetta is pretty much useless.
Yeah, it's very good at explaining the grammar part of Japanese. To me, speaking Japanese is more important than reading it if you're interested in having some fun with it.
This.
I took about 2 years of it in college and I think that put me on par with a Japanese child in elementary school. I mean...Then there's the fact that I'm about as bright as an elementary school student.
If you want a good book series, I'd take a look at the Japanese In Mangaland 3 book series and Kanji in Mangaland 3 book series. After you're ultimately done with those, you can be pretty confident in passing the level 3 Japanese Language Proficiency Test. It teaches you kanji from the get-go.
-Current W.I.P.
Or might have something similar. We used to have an online version of Rosetta Stone in my system, but the company decided to pull support from that product. We ended up getting a different online language learning program called Byki which has been pretty popular.
But definitely check your library to see if they have any books on CD.
My Backloggery
When you say you used a book, was it just a book or was it like a textbook/workbook combo? That worked well for me anyway.
The good thing about Rosetta Stone is that it tries to get you to understand how to construct your own sentences rather than memorizing key phrases. You may never need to say "the boy is drinking juice" but you should know how to make that sentence if you truly want to learn a language.
I would've continued to use it for free at my friend's house but I'm not sure if I would purchase it for full price.
Bother me on steam: kabbypan
2 things that really helped me learn to speak and read:
1.Texting with Japanese friends
2.Reading manga in Japanese, with furigana
1 might be harder, I was lucky to be in Japan so I had Japanese friends, I learned how to read quickly by texting all the time. Also karaoke helped a lot heh.
2 is probably what helped me learn a whole ton of idioms and slang, identifying how a child, or someone from Kansai, or an elderly person, or a rude teenager, etc.. speaks. It helped extend my vocabulary a lot and I learned a lot of Japanese customs. Urayasu Tekkin Kazoku was what I was reading, since I got the whole 32 books as a gift, it's mostly for kids but since it doesn't follow a single story line, you get to experience a whole lot of different scenarios.
Not exactly, there are spelling and grammar sections as well. It depends on what you configure during start-up.
I've been using Rosetta Stone to learn Russian and it works quite well, though I am using a hybrid approach. If you study just by book you could be pronouncing the language incorrectly, if you study using only Rosetta Stone you'll run into questions about tense, possessive, masculine/feminine, and conjugation.
I spend some time with the Rosetta lessons and then follow that up with a regular language book, I've also found that wiki is great for conjugation, tense...etc. When learning a language you need a mixture of exercises, verbal acknowledgment, and rules study. If you pair Rosetta stone with a few decent books and find a native speaker your success will be immeasurable.
This is incorrect, along with visual and audio learning Rosetta stone also uses spelling of the items and also has activities to type new words out via keyboard or mouse clicks. You can utilize Rosetta Stone for reading/writing.
Their new version Totale, adds on games for understanding written words as well.
The mic also had a lot of trouble when I was speaking on correctly identifying the words I was saying. Maybe it's my texas accent =/
The voice thing is common and slightly annoying. I've said words exactly the same way twice, failed the first time and passed the second. It's gotten slightly better as they've patched versions....also the opposite, I've butchered some words before and they passed. The primary benefit is actually hearing people talk in the application.
See Hom Bray
Just kidding.
Yeah I've heard of bad things in the past and Japanese isn't quite as ... "similar" as the Latin languages so direct 1-1 with few changed places seems a bit trickier teaching wise.