Jap. for Noobs

[NekoGnash]

Funny story: I've been lent a copy of a "learning program" called Rosetta Stone particularly for said Japanese language.  Although anxious I think I'll put it aside until I have a good amount of spare time to go through some lessons.
My question is - any good/bad things to say about this program?  [Suposedly it's one of "the best" out there but comments on the cardboard box it came with can sometimes be misleading]  Anyone have success/failure stories to share with the same program or something similar?

[Phren]

It depends on your learning style. Myself I found it fairly hard to use.
 I need Academic style - accurate translation and explanations of what things mean and how to use them, and Rosetta stone has none of that. It's just a picture and a caption supposedly telling you what that is with no explanation for WHAT the heck is going on in it. And with a lot of verbs and such, it's really hard to tell exactly what is going on in the picture and telling the difference between an "onnanohito" and an "otokonohito" is even sometimes more difficult then it rightly should be. Supposedly, it's trying to get you to learn things 'more fluently' and without tying meaning of Japanese words to definitions in your own language, but I found I really needed to know WHY a verb changed and in what situations and such, and it really put me off. : /

For getting a quick start (though, just in the audio realm, not so much for reading/writing) I found the program called "Linkword" to not be that bad. Keep in mind that the romanisation is HORRIBLE, so it's mostly just for the sounds, but it gives you a good starting base and has you constructing simple sentences in little time.
This is just my opinion, mind you, as I've said,  it really depends on your learning style.


Also, isn't this your second topic on the matter here?

[bungiefan]

Rosetta Stone is meant to teach by immersion, without relying on you to know a specific language previously. It works well enough if you use it on a regular basis, as instructed. About half an hour to an hour a day should work, but you'll have to try for yourself and see if you can actually learn well by immersion. Learning by immersion requires you to be observant and be able to notice patterns and make your own correct conclusions. It's not going to come out and tell you that Japanese is a syllabic language when you try to start learning the actual writing, but listening and actually watching the writing on the screen should drill it into you if you don't just get frustrated and give up.

However, it won't teach you how to actually write the symbols for the language, and it gives you a romaji mode that is pretty useless if you're trying to actually learn the language in a way it will be used. You'll have to use other sources to learn the stroke order for kanji and kana.

The software is designed to be intuitive to use, and works to teach anybody the target language, no matter what language they already know. I've had little problem in the units I've done associating the ideas in the images with the words, but I've also had some college classroom experience with the language. My friends that have tried it without taking any college classes have been able to similarly identify the ideas and complete the units.