Quote:
Originally Posted by Shineko
Hello, I would like to purchase the rosetta stone: japanese levels 1 and 2.
I have a couple of questions before I purchase it:
1. Does any body know how long it takes to become fluent with rosseta stone
home-school curriculum?
2. How good is the textbook and software work, does it teach you grammer
and words every so many lessons?
3. Is the kanji learning effective, and how is it taught?
I've heard it was really good software and I've taken the demo online
so can any body help me? 
THIS IS NOT SPAM! im not advertising! |
Here I'll give you the answers that I can:
1. There's no possible way to tell how long it will take
you. The whole point of Rosetta Stone is to teach you
conversational japanese at your own pace.
2. As far as I've seen with the (small) textbook, I didn't like it. It only teaches you words and sentances in Romaji. Basically, it doesn't teach you grammer or Hiragana/Katakana. I decided to go with the Genki 1 & 2 books; they've shown me that their book is definitely for grammatically-based people, while giving you structured, well written vocabulary lists and differant Kanji (with Furigana) every lesson. Plus, they only use Romaji for the first two lessons, so I'd suggest (if you haven't already) your learning of Hiragana and Katakana.
If you want to be truly fluent in Japanese, than stay away from Rosetta Stone.
postscript: all of this was written in my own humble opinion of Rosseta stone, so if anybody used it first and then went on to other books and such, than that's great.