Rocket Japanese Premium review feedback

KayronSat, 11 Jun 2011 21:28:51 -0500
みんなさん、こんにちは!よろしくおねがいします。
I have completed the first level of the Japanese course. First of all I'd like to say, thank you for an enriching, interesting and worthwhile experience. It has sparked my interest in the language even moreso than when I decided to take the course. This course has brought me from a level of knowing very few individual words, to reading Hiragana/Katakana easily (something I didn't expect), understanding complete sentences as well as making sense of some sentence structures. So どもありがとう for that I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn Japanese from an absolute beginner level. I do have a few suggestions, though.

a. Personally, I found that the best reading experience for me was reading in Japanese as much as possible. I found the constant romanization of words a bit...well, disappointing as I found myself struggling not to look at the Romaji transcripts which were right where the Japanese text was. I had to copy/paste the text to an empty notepad window. I think there should be an option to only show the type of text a user chooses - Either original, Romaji or translated or any combination of these.

b. I sometimes found the language/writing sections of the non-audio lessons a bit too slow. I'll give an example - The kanji lessons on numbers shouldn't have been divided the way they were...learning these 13 kanji (一二三四五六七八九十百千万) should only take about one lesson, two at most. If I recall correctly they were divided into four lessons. The reason I mention this is that I would have liked it more if more kanji were introduced throughout the course (consider 10 kanji per lesson, that change alone would introduce more than a hundred different kanji characters, which is considerably more than about guessing here 30 characters currently)

c. This isn't directly related to the course itself, but if it was possible to purchase access to these courses on a monthly basis, it might help convince more people to give it a try. I'm not saying the current pricing model is bad, it has its advantages, but perhaps some people might prefer being given this option. I for one would gladly purchase the next level in this manner if given the choice, as I cannot afford to pay the full upfront price.

And lastly, a question about the MegaJapanese software games - from what I understand, they seem to be based on learning through trial and error..? I mean, how are the users expected to know the correct answers? A lot (most?) of the vocabulary words have not been mentioned throughout the course, and to me it seemed like I needed to either guess, or look up the words (which to me would feel like cheating). Of course, I could be overlooking something here - are there vocabulary lists I could look over before starting the game? A possible suggestion to fix that could be including example sentences in Japanese for each choice, making it easier to guess based on the sentence's context.

Thanks for reading all this.
ありがとうございます
カイロン
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4.5 out of 5

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Yours sincerely,

Sayaka Matsuura

Sayaka Matsuura
Rocket Japanese

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