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Rosetta Stone Japanese Level 1 with Audio Companion |  | From: Rosetta Stone
Category: Software
List Price: $229.00
Buy New: $195.00
as of 9/4/2010 06:04 CDT details
You Save: $34.00 (15%)
New (3) from $195.00
Seller: Amazon.com
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 508
Format: CD-ROM
Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS X
Genre: Childrens Foreign Language Software
Media: CD-ROM
Edition: Level 1
Operating System: Mac OS X
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 6.4 x 3.1
MPN: 21715
Model: 21715
ISBN: 1603917004
UPC: 794678217159
EAN: 9781603917001
ASIN: B001AFEO9C
Release Date: June 16, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Features:
| • | Rosetta Stone teaches you a new language naturally, by getting you to think, live and breathe the language | | • | Innovative solutions get you speaking new words, right from the start | | • | Rosetta Stone moves forward only when you're ready--you drive the pace, you set the schedule | | • | With Rosetta Stone, you'll discover a foundation of key vocabulary that you'll use to build into a whole new language | | • | Audio Companion lets you take the Rosetta Stone experience anywhere: in the car, at the gym, or on-the-go |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Rosetta Stone Personal Edition contains everything you need to give the voice inside of you a new language. The method used recreates the natural way you learned your first language, revealing skills that you already have. This approach has won numerous awards, and has been adopted by countless organizations, schools and millions of users around the world. Join the language revolution today. Only with Rosetta Stone. The comprehensive language-learning solution that fits your life. Learn Naturally
Learn your next language the same way you learned your first language. Dynamic Immersion empowers you to see, hear and comprehend without translating or memorizing. You already have this ability. Rosetta Stone simply unlocks it. Engage Interactively
Get feedback to move forward. You learn best by doing, and you'll apply what you've learned to get to the next step. Rosetta Stone adapts to your individual needs and skills, because you drive the program with your progress. Speak Confidently
Start speaking immediately. From the very first lesson, you'll speak. You'll begin with essential basics, which form the building blocks of the language. Soon you'll create new sentences on your own, using words you've learned. Have Fun
Best of all, Rosetta Stone is addictive. With every entertaining activity, you'll feel success. You'll want to use Rosetta Stone to have that next moment, that next breakthrough. So you'll keep using it, and you'll learn more! That's language-learning success.
That's Rosetta Stone. No translation or memorization required. The most effective way to learn a new language is to be surrounded by it. When you were an infant, your parents taught you this way, by intuitively associating words with images. That's the ultimate language lab, but most language-learning programs completely ignore this. Think about all of the ways you've tried to learn a language: classes at school, tapes and cassettes, even software that uses your native language as a base for your next one. What do they all have in common? Translation and memorization. 
Instead of taking a "direct flight" from your brain to your new language, translation and memorization connects you to your old language. You always have to "fly" from your brain, to your native tongue ... and then translate what you've memorized to communicate. That might work for a few words, but what happens when you get to a sentence or phrase? When you have to change tenses? You're going to make a lot of "connecting flights." That's why those other methods are so frustrating ... and why they fail. Enter Dynamic Immersion.
This method encourages you to think like a baby. You'll pair words with vivid, real-life images and make connections between things you know and the new language. Soon, you'll be thinking in a new language, stringing words together into phrases that you create. Innovative technology.
Rosetta Stone places this Dynamic Immersion method at the core of a suite of software that works with you to develop your skills. The simple, intuitive interface helps to keep you engaged in the solution, while advanced speech recognition technology makes certain that you're speaking correctly and accurately. Best of all, Rosetta Stone never leaves you behind. You'll only move forward when you're ready, when you've become comfortable and confident. Discover the building blocks of a new language: Level 1.
Your journey begins with a foundation of fundamental vocabulary and language structure that you'll need to begin to think, live and breathe in your new language. Rosetta Stone's solution will give you the confidence to master basic conversational skills. You'll be able to introduce yourself, say "Hello" and "Goodbye," ask and answer simple questions, go shopping and so much more. Audio Companion
With Audio Companion, you'll enhance the Rosetta Stone experience wherever you go. You'll learn new skills on the computer, and then reinforce what you've learned with Audio Companion. Simply play the CDs on a stereo or download them to a MP3 Player. Each Audio Companion activity corresponds to a lesson in the Rosetta Stone software, so you can turn your travel time into productive language-learning time. Inside the box, you'll find: - Version 3 Personal Edition CD-ROM software for Level 1 (Windows/Mac)
- Headset microphone
- User's guide
- Audio Companion, a multiple-CD set to play or download to your MP3 player
Product Description
As children, we gradually learned our first language through a process of associating mental images with words or phrases, accompanied by complete immersion in our environment. This approach was simple because it was natural and allowed the brain to adapt to increasing complexity. In learning a new language, Rosetta Stone replicates this process to provide the best and friendliest language learning software tool. Learn as many languages as you want!
Rosetta Stone Personal Edition contains everything you need to start learning a language. It's built around the award-winning Rosetta Stone curriculum, which has been adopted by organizations around the world including the U.S. Army, NASA, major corporations such as Deutsche Telecom, IKEA, Royal Dutch Shell, and over 10,000 schools worldwide--and is available in 31 languages spoken by over 90% of the world's population.
Proceed at Your Own Pace - Rosetta Stone is considerate of your time. Anytime, anywhere, you can learn a new language with Rosetta Stone. You learn comfortably without feeling pressured or overwhelmed. Rosetta Stone provides guidance to make your language learning effective, fast, and enjoyable with a process that is intuitive, interactive, and visually engaging. At the end of each lesson, you are given the opportunity to test your new skills. And, since Rosetta Stone automatically records your progress, you can easily pick up where you left off, when other priorities arise.
Dynamic Immersion - Rosetta Stone uses rich visual imagery to help you learn. You will be presented with sets of images to match correctly with a spoken or written phrase in the new language. You will advance to the next set of prompts once you've successfully matched words and images and pronounced the words correctly. With Dynamic Immersion, you learn by directly associating your new language with images--nothing is lost in translation.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
 prepare to have your intelligence and pronunciation skills insulted August 22, 2010
Big Sur local
I found the method with which Rosetta Stone introduced new vocabulary and items of grammar and tested me on them to be horribly slow and actually insulting to my intelligence. Clicking on pictures over and over again is the main form of "interactive learning" the software offers and it gets old really quickly. For example, to introduce the word "kuruma/car", the software shows you a picture of a car and a native speaker says "kuruma", and then it immediately shows you a different picture of a different car and the native speaker again says "kuruma", and then the native speaker says "kuruma" for a third time and shows you a choice of three pictures including another car, a newspaper, and a dog, and you have to click on the picture of the car to complete that activity. Repeat ad infinitum with only slight variations on the theme. They should call this Rosetta Bone... for Bonehead! This kind of "interactive learning" might keep a 3-year-old entertained for awhile but it made me want to throw my computer out the window after less than an hour of feeling like I was being treated like I have the analytical ability and interests of a toddler. I can't think of a more boring way to learn a language. I'd rather read a dictionary, and I'd learn a lot more a lot faster if I did!
I probably would have plugged along with Rosetta Stone anyways just to see where it got me, except that the speech recognition works frustratingly poorly and makes it impossible for me to use any of the considerable number of activities that require me to speak to complete them, and this effectively stalled out my progress. The system basically could only recognize my speech partially accurately if I spoke very slowly, just like the native speakers in the program speak. And it always failed to recognize my speaking certain words and sounds, including very notably the verb ending "imasu", no matter how closely I imitated the tone and speed of the speaker. I already have considerable experience speaking basic Japanese, and native speakers can understand me just fine. Those who are close enough to me to be gently honest tell me my grammar and vocabulary are pretty limited but my pronunciation is quite good, so I'm sure the problem isn't that I can't pronounce the very easy sound of "imasu" accurately. The speech recognition has some problem that makes it not even seem to be able to recognize at all, ever, that I said "imasu". I even had it set only on "normal" sensitivity. One time I involuntarily coughed instead of speaking while the system was recording me and it gave me a perfect score for the Japanese word I was supposed to be saying at that moment. I'm not sure what the heck it's analyzing, but if it can't differentiate a cough from a Japanese word, no wonder it's giving me a hard time! Maybe I could continue to make progress by just coughing everytime I'm supposed to say "imasu"!
There is no mechanism to speed up the speech of the native speakers in any of the teaching and activity sections, so you're stuck with them speaking very unrealistically slowly, which is also extremely frustrating and ultimately unhelpful because even 3-year-olds in Japan get spoken to at a much faster speed than this. Nobody will ever speak as slowly as Rosetta Stone does to you when you're in Japan, even to be nice to you when you don't understand them, so there's no point learning this speech pattern, it will get you nowhere. The only place in the software where you can increase the speed of the speech is if you go into the supplementary speech analysis sections where you can only have a single word or phrase pronounced at a more realistic speed. Then when you return to the lessons themselves, the speech reverts to the super slow pace.
Also, Rosetta Stone claims its system allows you to learn language the way children learn, and yet it begins with the slightly longer and more complex adult-style normal-polite verb form (for example "kanojo ha hashitte imasu/the girl is running") instead of introducing the much simpler informal structure which would be easier to learn at first and is the form children actually learn to use first ("hashitte iru" or "hashitte'ru"). Rosetta Stone thus starts the beginner with the usual problem language learning programs impart of not being able to talk to one's buddies in Japan in an informal manner.
I bought this product on sale 15% off list price and it was still very expensive considering I can get a more efficient learning tool in the Pimsleur Japanese series of CDs for about a tenth of the price of Rosetta Stone Japanese... or I could just check Pimsleur out from most urban local libraries for free.
The only things that impress me about this product are that they have an online learning community where you can supposedly practice with other people including native speakers, and that there's a 6 month money-back guarantee, the latter of which I'll definitely be using.
Fred Waddell May 31, 2010
Fred E. Waddell (VA, USA)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
I have completed Rosetta Stone Japanese I&II, and also Pimsleur's Japanese I&II, have just returned from two weeks in Japan, and as a former Russian Linguist (Army Language School) must say that Rosetta Stone is wasted money for numerous reasons. First, there is no grammar or other explanation of the language, NO vocabulary provided (I had to get an English-Japanese distionary) on line to make sense of most of the language patterns, the vocabulary and language patterns are not those one would use most often in Japan, would provide little or no help in interpersonal communication in day to day matters. I only wish I could get my money back, particularly after having completed Levels I&II of another Japanese Language program that is far superior to Rosetta Stone, and having just returned from Japan can say it far more useful than Rosetta Stone. SAVE YOUR MONEY- EXPLORE OTHER OPTIONS.
 Great program, fun to use! August 28, 2009
Fiontar McEoghan (Massachusetts, USA)
28 out of 28 found this review helpful
I've been using Rosetta Stone Japanese Level 1 for a few weeks now. It's a lot of fun and is addictive. You actually want to fire it up each day, not because you have to, but you want to!
A couple tips I would offer:
First, for Japanese, it's a very good idea to learn the Kana alphabets first. This is Hiragana and Katakana, the first is used for native words, the second for loan words. The characters represent vowels or consonant/vowel pairings that make up all the sounds in the Japanese language. Rosetta Stone provides some rudimentary teaching of Kana in the program, but it would be much more useful as a tool to solidify your grasp of the Kana, rather than for learning from scratch. Once you have the basics down (I recommend pairing a flash card product with an online audio/video source to get the pronunciation right), learning to pronounce words in Japanese will be much easier. Rosetta Stone lets you switch how the words are displayed, Romaji, which uses the western alphabet to spell out the words; Kana, which I just discussed, Kanji, which is the much more complex writing system based on Chinese characters and Kanji using Furigana, which displays the kana to pronounce the kanji above each kanji character.
Romaji is a crutch that is best left unused as much as possible. What's great about Rosetta Stone is that after having learned the basics of the kana before hand, this software has greatly improved the speed at which I can read Kana and I am starting to recognize words at a glance, rather than having to sound out everything. I'm also learning to recognize a lot of the Kanji characters by using the product mostly in the setting to show Kanji with the furigana. Previously, learning the Kanji just seems way too daunting.
Second tip is to power through as much as you can, even if you don't understand everything at first. The way the software helps you learn, it's easy to puzzle out an answer even if you don't really understand all the words in the sentence. Over time, your brain starts to figure out the pieces you are missing. The software will schedule reviews of previously learned materials, but I would recommend not waiting...
What I did was create two user profiles for myself. I pushed through all of Unit one, doing a half hour to an hour each day. I was able to get scores mostly in the 90s as I went, even if I didn't really understand everything. It was when I hit the end of Unit Milestone, that I quickly identified my strong points and my weak points. That's when I started over again with a second profile. I was amazed that at the second way through, the elements I wasn't really grasping were now much more obvious and the holes in my knowledge started to fill in. I also found that repeating full sentences was much easier and much more fluid the second time through.
I plan to alternate this way as I progress, a unit at a time. I'll do unit two with my first profile next, then repeat unit two with the second profile, etc... When I finish all four units this way, I plan on repeating all four units from the start before moving onto level 2.
Third tip, speak the language as much as you can. Listen to the audio companion and repeat the words and phrases, even if with out the context of the images the software provides, you aren't sure what you are saying. Also, when you encounter something in your daily life that you can describe or address with what you've learned in Japanese, do so, even if it's just to yourself. Is someone running? Are you drinking juice? Is a girl walking? Is a dog eating? Is a woman wearing a skirt? Use the Japanese phrases you've learned to describe what you are seeing. It helps a lot to solidify your knowledge by using the language this way. If you have a patient and supportive friend, family member or even pet that doesn't mind you telling them what things are in Japanese, (even if it goes in one ear and out the other), do so!
In addition to staggered review, as I mentioned in tip two, if you find yourself completely lost, take a day off, then go back to earlier lessons and work forward again. The entire program is building a foundation for your understanding of the language a brick at a time and you will be amazed how lessons that had you scratching your head a week ago will be so much more clear if you back track and repeat the journey. :) However, don't obsess about knowing everything 100% before you move to the next lesson. You'll just burn out if you take that approach. It really is best to push your limits before going back and working through a stretch a second time through.
I've tried to learn Japanese with other methods and Rosetta stone has been by far the best. I've learned more in the last month than in the previous year of sporadic self study using books and CDs. Stick with it, backtrack when you need to, or for review and it really will build an understanding of the language over time.
Was ripped off by the seller. Advertised as new and it wasn't July 19, 2009
Jay Speaser
6 out of 52 found this review helpful
Never could use the product, as it wouldn't load on the laptop. CDs were scratched and dirty. Waiting on Amazon to make it right. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM Lanara_27.
Off to a great start! January 19, 2009
Momma Bear (Boston, MA)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
My daughter was on this so fast and she quickly picked up the routine. The only con is if you have an eager student they are finished with level one very quickly but I don't think there is another system of learning a language that is as good with feedback.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
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