Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been living in Japan for almost three years now and have been trying hard to learn the language independently. After hearing about it here and there, I decided to purchase the double-pack of Rosetta Stone's Japanese software a year and a half ago. Based upon the U.S. State Department's sworn-by language study program, Rosetta Stone gets a lot of hype (and a fair bit of advertising) for its effectiveness. For a language as thoroughly dissimilar from English as Japanese, however, it comes up a bit short. While I used it almost daily for a few months after purchasing it - mostly out of discipline - I've found it doing little more than taking up hard drive space recently. Certainly it teaches a lot of vocabulary across its many lessons, and the methodology - likened to that of a child's language acquisition - has its merits in theory. Unfortunately, the design of the software makes it entirely too easy to remember words and phrases without ever producing them yourself. Unlike the Pimsleur programs, which constantly force you to speak and apply what you have learned, Rosetta Stone is too oriented around associative reaction. The pictures are static (and frequently of poor, grainy quality), resulting in the user recognizing single images more than actual words and concepts. For solely building vocabulary, this sort of methodology works to an extent. But, as any student of Japanese can tell you, it isn't the kind of language where you can just throw words together in hopes of forming an understandable sentence. Anyone familiar with the stereotype of Japanese-English being oft-incomprehensible? There's a reason for this: the way Japanese grammar functions is completely different from that of English. Any attempt to directly translate something will just result in puzzled looks. Rosetta Stone will not teach you a wink of grammar, so when you encounter things like comparatives, you won't have a clue WHY they're expressed that way nor even what each component exactly means. For any language student that likes an even slightly analytical approach, this aspect is extremely off-putting. The software gives you the option of seeing the text in romaji, kana or kanji. Romaji is, of course, a cinch, but the others are unintelligible to complete beginners as the program will not teach you how to read them. So, in the very least, you will have to purchase a kana text to learn hiragana or katakana; relying on romaji is usually discouraged by most Japanese language students and educators. As for the kanji option, well, there's no furigana, so you'd best not bother. By the time you could actually read it, you probably wouldn't learn anything new from this software anyhow. A noble effort, and perhaps one that works well for Indo-European languages, but frankly Rosetta Stone's not worth the expense. If you do get it, expect to supplement it heavily with other materials as you will *not* become fluent (or, arguably, even comprehensible) from this. The Pimsleur series is a good, if pricey, start and texts like the Japanese For Busy People series (preferably with accompanying cds) and James W. Heisig's Remembering the Kana & Remembering the Kanji are much more comprehensive. Ganbatte!