So, by now it’s well established that I’m a bit of a weeaboo (wapanese, whichever you prefer).
But despite the appearances I’m not all that much of a weeaboo (was a bit worse when I was younger), I may enjoy various forms of entertainment media out of Japan (manga, anime, VNs, eroges) and would sincerely love to visit Japan for a month or two (or maybe three or four; between the otaku weeabooing and driving/hiking to the boonies it would be a probably awesome experience…), I’m still very…mild about it.
I know people who are worse, a cousin of mine who is also a bit of a weeaboo (courtesy of yours truly, me), after being shown the Babymetal clip I showed in another post he just replied (after the obvious “how the hell do you find these things on the net and I don’t?”): “I liked that. This year you don’t have to give me a birthday present.” and he actually affirms he would love to go live in Japan.
I wouldn’t. Travel and stay there for a few months? Hell yeah! Live there (indefinitely)? Hell no! I don’t belong there. (I think it’s a matter of principles and world view)
But I digress. This wasn’t about how I would love to go to Japan or not. Nor about my ethnogeographic beliefs.
It was about weeabooing more than usual.
And what is it?
Well in all those ‘dreams’ about travelling to Japan, I always (very realistically) remember one little detail:
- I can’t understand moonspeak.
- Nor read moonrunes.
That’s two points but in fact it’s only one, can’t understand shit of Japanese (lies, I know about ten words, one of which is strawberry, another is bread and another is water; I guess I could subsist on a diet of bread, strawberries and water while visiting Japan 
)
So I set off to change that and learn Japanese!
Just like I did twelve years ago.
And ten years ago.
And…
Well, I guess you get it.
This time I decided trying the RosettaStone software (Rosetta Course). Which boasts a “immersion learning” method of teaching languages.
This is not exactly a review, just as none of my rants about games are reviews…they are just rants, just a way to spend some time typing on the computer while constructing sentences that may have no point.
I’ll admit the method used might work great for some languages, but I think Japanese is not one of them, at least not for roman alphabet based language speakers.
Mostly thanks to the moonrunes. Even then, maybe the “immersion learning” thing would work, after a couple of ‘traditional’ lessons to give you the basics and a couple basic lessons teaching you hiragana (and maybe katakana), the immersion thing could go using these basics, until you master it enough and then start getting acquainted with kanji.
No, there’s none of that, it just throws you into the thing. You could just choose for the program to present you the romanized text, but it would kind of defeat the purpose of learning a non roman alphabet based language, no?
I personally think it’s just too sudden of a change. With the lack of rule setting lessons (which they boast as a ‘pro’, not a ‘con’), I feel like I’m just randomly clicking without actually understanding anything. Even better when you actually have to speak, I feel I’m just mindlessly mimicking the sounds I hear, but no information is actually retained.
Another negative about changing the text to the romanized version is when you get to this:
Ah, yes, moonrunes, with no option to change to Earth writing.
And that is very early on, actually in the fourth section of Lesson 1 of Unit 1 of the Level 1 of the Japanese course. The “Core Lessons” are even more haunting, as they agglomerate all that you will learn in that lesson, except they do it at THE BEGINNING of the thing and you are expected to do well. (about that I will jestingly say it must be part of the immersion thing as it was very stereotypically Japanese…get a score under 90% and you fail)
If I hadn’t acquired a basic understanding of hiragana some years ago (which is admittedly vague and blurry) , I would’ve been completely lost.
Also I feel that their “immersion learning” which they rationalize by saying that’s how babies learn a language: by immersion, fails at two things:
- We are not babies anymore, for the good and the bad, we’re used to structured ideas and a myriad of rules, dropping them to learn how to say “Goodbye” in Japanese is not very efficient.
- The immersion stops as soon as you leave the program, indigenous babies don’t have that luxury.
Not to say that looking at the thing, the number of levels and the speed and cadence of the lessons difficulty rise, I have a feeling that by the end of Level 3 I will barely be able to ask for directions to the nearest hotel and I’ll be amazed if I can read a single 日本語 word that isn’t romanized.
Another thing is that the speed of speech is…retard level (you know, how people tend to speak with retarded people): very slowly and with a je ne sais quoi that doesn’t really help (really, I don’t know how to describe it, but I feel speed and flow isn’t the only thing bad in ‘retard speak’).
That can be mildly counteracted by watching anime or movies out of Japan, but that’s on par with watching Hollywood movies to learn English, i.e. the speed and flow is quite a bit closer to the norm, but chances are it still isn’t quite as bad as the real thing in the streets; maybe also looking on youtube for some Japanese ‘everyday’ videos. But realistically, that’s as good as it gets without shipping yourself to the country of interest.
I could also complain about the high price tag of the program, but I won’t as someone gave it to me. (second or third hand already, old version too)
P.S.: It does have a section with hiragana and katakana. The problem is it isn’t part of the classes, heck, I found it by sheer luck. It’s on the help menu -> alphabet.
Could be buried deeper…
As far as I’ve noticed up to now, no kanji basics. (then again, I’m on Lesson one of Unit one of Level one. I may be surprised.)
And that’s it for today, see, I’m not all 100% about violent video games and perverted video games and…other wretched forms of media.
But I’ll admit that’s partly a tactic to soften the blow of two upcoming rants about perverted video games (18+) out of Japan. (joking, joking…or am I?)