Quote:
Originally Posted by Sublymonal
I've only completed the first "unit" in "level 1 Japanese". This is where I plan to take a stop so I can learn all the hiragana/katakana.
As for what I can "do"... Not a whole lot. I can ask basic questions [e.g. "what is that?", "who is eating", "is the horse running?"], I can make statements of fact [e.g. "he is wearing a hat on his head"] and statements of... falseness [e.g. "he's not wearing a shirt"]. I can also answer basic questions. I can count to six, know about eight colors, know some basic items and articles of clothing, refer to myself [e.g. "I'm a cop"], and some other baiscs. As if these things were not a clue, the unit is entitled "Language Basics".
Really haven't compared it with much of anything. My eldest brother used to have one of those "Japanese for Dummies" books, which, naturally, was terrible, but that's it. Compared to my learning speed in Latin though, this goes a bit quicker [Latin is HARD].
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Problem is, you would never say most of those things in real life... That and, rosetta stone teaches you the way a foreigner would say things, and most of the stuff on there, I don't believe sounds close to the way a native person would say it. It also teaches you to use anata, boku, watashi and other types of I and You all the time, but in reality, words like I and You are probably the least said in japanese, thats not to say they aren't said, they just aren't used very often because one is usually able to tell who the other person is speaking about through context.
Imo, Rosetta Stone teaches you japanese the wrong way. When I tried it, I completed unit 1 and most of 2. One thing I noticed is that they only used the -te forum of every verb. Which is defiantly not what you would use in every sentence you make (Which is what rosetta stone taught you)
Although, I only went that far and don't know much more about it. I think Rosetta Stone has some kind of satisfaction guarantee, if they do, I would really recommend getting your money back, because there are much better ways to learn japanese available for free online.
To list a few...
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AJATT (As Shad0w suggested)
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Tae Kim's Japanese guide to Japanese grammar (Very good Japanese grammar guide, covers a lot of topics)
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Reviewing The Kanji (Mainly for people with the RTK books, but you don't need them, this can help you memorize the meanings of over 2000 Kanji)
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Anki (The best flash card program, using spaced repitition, which is proved to work, you can use it for anything from Vocabulary to Grammar to Kanji)
