2010-12-23, 06:01 AM
I downloaded it a while ago. I'm somewhere in the second unit in Level 1 at the moment. So far, I think it's excellent for raw vocab, but they fall way short on a few things that they really should have explained. They try to teach you Japanese without speaking any English. While this works great for, as I said, vocab, it's less than optimal for thing such as the "counters" (人 nin, 本 hon, 枚 mai, 冊 satsu, 匹 hiki, 個 ko, etc.) which they tried to teach early in Unit 2, but I was left totally confused until I looked it up. I also have a feeling they tried to teach me the particles は, が, and を, but I'm sure I wouldn't have understood them if I hadn't already known them. I personally supplement it with Tae Kim's grammar guide, because some things just require english explanation.
The voice-tutor isn't really that bad if you annunciate well, so that wasn't much of an issue for me. But don't feel bad if you get bored -- especially early on. They use a lot of repetition to help you remember the vocab. You can totally skip over the "reading" sections for quite a while since I know you already know hiragana and katakana. You might benefit quite a bit from having kanji turned on (you can change how the things they're saying at you are displayed: romanji, kana, kanji with furigana, and kanji) if you need kanji practice though.
The voice-tutor isn't really that bad if you annunciate well, so that wasn't much of an issue for me. But don't feel bad if you get bored -- especially early on. They use a lot of repetition to help you remember the vocab. You can totally skip over the "reading" sections for quite a while since I know you already know hiragana and katakana. You might benefit quite a bit from having kanji turned on (you can change how the things they're saying at you are displayed: romanji, kana, kanji with furigana, and kanji) if you need kanji practice though.