Cheap Instant Immersion Japanese Deluxe 2.0 (Large Box) (Software) (Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP) Price

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Customer Reviews of Instant Immersion Japanese Deluxe 2.0 (Large Box)

Maybe not what you expected...still useful
こんにちは! <
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>This review sounds a little harsh now that I'm done writing it, but I'm actually giving it three stars because of the JquickTrans, the Audio CDs, and the fact that they included audio in the dictionary. I think it's actually quite useful if you're already at a certain proficiency level (or if you don't care about learning to write!). I'm still debating whether or not to return it as, despite my criticisms, it is still useful for the price...only, it's just not what I expected. <
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>I feel the first thing you should know about this product is, it does NOT teach you how to write, what the letters are, or even how to read phonetically. Remember how the selling point is immersion? It seems to take a whole-language approach, figuring that just learning the words is enough without knowing the individual phonemes. HOWEVER - this is not too awful, since there are many free resources online - try Googling for "Genki self-study room" for audio and writing of hiragana and katakana. You will want to memorize reading and saying these two charts before attempting to use this program; then you will start with the decently helpful Grammar articles and a lot of Glossary checking before moving on to the other stuff.　　On the other hand, if you already know hiragana and katakana you will surely benefit from the practice reading and pronouncing them. Kanji is also frequently referenced in "Beginner"-level exercises without any immediate explanation (sometimes it's kind of hard to look up if you don't know what it sounds like!) You can go back to that Genki self-study room for some Kanji help, or you can search for a Kanji Java app - I'm not as much help there, since I do not know Kanji myself. <
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>With that out of the way, on to the review. <
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>As far as the user interface, the programs are kind of clunky and old-looking. The Instant Immersion product as a whole feels thrown together, as if the company simply bought a series of other tools and tried to make a language product out of them. There are two separate programs, Tell Me More CJ and JTrans. <
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>-----Tell Me More CJ----- <
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>The main thing to note is there is NO SYSTEMATIC TEACHING. You're literally supposed to try the exercises and guess the right answers until you get it down. As a method of learning, it may be effective for some, but I certainly prefer to try to understand the system before learning the stuff that uses it. It really feels like trying to add before learning to count. <
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>This has a rather low-tech feel to it; was it really made in 2005? They still haven't figured out how to use InstallShield for the setup. The interface is a little annoying; you're presented with a goofy backstage filming set and you're supposed to click on different parts of the set to do things. It took me a couple minutes to figure out where the exit was (it's the door in the back). The main things to remember are the question-mark Help button, and the Previous arrow in the lower-left corner (so you can use the Glossary in the middle of a lesson and then come back instead of having to go through the whole interface all over again!) <
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>The options panel (the sound panel in the goofy interface) lets you set some options, such as the difficulty level and your preference for Romaji or Furigana. This last option unfortunately does not effect all levels of the program; some exercises give you Romaji no matter what; this program's reliance on Romaji is something to note for those, like me, who wish to learn the actual letters. <
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>The glossary's good (click the books in the interface); and you can have Furigana here. Additionally, it tries to be intelligent - if you click on the Reference icon while in the middle of a lesson, it will *usually* jump to the relevant word. There are some human errors in some of the words, such as forgetting to include furigana or repeating it twice. The words are alphabetized by Romaji instead of the standard Japanese system. There's also a collection of articles about grammar - but annoyingly enough, the programmer's designers have decided for you what your reading speed is! If you wait about 10 seconds, it will move to the next page. If you want to pause, you can "Click to pause", but as soon as you go to the next page (click the flap) it will start up again! <
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>The pronounciation system (click the hanging mic in the interface) looks useful at first, until you realize there's only focused practice for the five basic vowel sounds (a, i, u, e, o) and not for each consonant-vowel pair. Furthermore, there are only two or three words for each one! Now if you go to the word level, you can pick words to practice, but there are only so many. (It makes me wonder, why didn't they pair this with the dictionary, which has audio for each word?) Going to the sentence level seems more useful; you get to learn to read quickly and you can practice conversational flow a little bit. This system is much better with a good headset - for the pronounciation rating to be useful, you need to not have background noise. <
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>Go to the Exercises (the writing pad) and you'll be dumped in front of a picture and given four words to choose from, and mostly kanji too! THIS PRODUCT IS NOT GOING TO TEACH YOU NEW WORDS. You're going to have to go to the dictionary and look each one up if you want to know what they mean. AN IMPORTANT NOTE - The Romaji may be confusing to a lot of you. Many of us are used to seeing aa, ii, uu ei, ou to indicate long vowels, but this program uses ?, ?, ?, ?, ?. If you type ou into the Romaji parts of the exercises, it won't recognize it as the correct word. Instead you'll have to click on the thoughtfully provided icon for ?. <
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>In the Dialogue (the guy in the middle) you will hear some sentences spoken and then the system will wait for you to read one of the two or three choices back to the computer. Again, this is really only useful if you either know the words already, or at least can read them pretty quickly - you won't know what's going on in the dialogue, but at least you can practice the pronounciation. <
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>Clicking the clothes set will let you choose between two different lesson sets for the Dialogue and the Exercises. From reading the Help file, it seems the interface was designed for more than two choices but they didn't have enough material. <
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>You can click the globe to go online, where all you'll see is club.auralog.com, which is basically a naked attempt to sell you tutoring and translation services. <
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>Clicking the trophy gets you a lesson report, telling you your scores so far. <
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>There's a Camera that's disabled; apparently that's for the Platinum version they haven't made yet. <
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>-----JquickTrans----- <
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>VERY USEFUL. I like it a lot. You're supposed to be able to type in Romaji, English definition, or Japanese characters. Unfortunately there's some conflict between this product and my Windows 2000 Japanese IME; if you type out some Japanese characters all you'll get is a bunch of question marks and the search will not succeed. Maybe you will have better luck with this, but you can still copy and paste the Japanese from another document (ie, go to Wordpad, type out some Japanese, and copy and paste it into JTrans). <
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>Here's a breakdown of the CDs. <
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>-----Tell Me More Lessons----- <
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>#1 - Tell Me More - Beginner Japanese <
>I'm amused at their definition of Beginner. If you just wander around clicking stuff you're gonna get pretty bewildered, so you'll have to be pretty self-directed and motivated to benefit from this. And it's worth pointing out again that there's NO LESSONS ON LETTERS/KANJI. You should either get this program and some workbook or software supplement for learning to write, or buy another program altogether. <
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>#2 - Tell Me More - Intermediate Japanese <
>As others have noted, there's a bit of a jump from Beginner to Advanced - suffice it to say, at my level of Japanese, the jump's a bit high (the Beginner CD won't take you to this level by itself, so you'll want other resources) but I was still able to make some use of the materials there. <
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>#3 - Tell Me More - Advanced Japanese <
>I'm not proficient enough to review it, but I will say they all use the same basic exercises; they just ratchet up the difficulty. <
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>-----JquickTrans CD----- <
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>#4 - JquickTrans <
>See above about JquickTrans. <
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>-----Audio CD Lessons----- <
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>#5 - Alphabet; Sounds; Pronounciation. <
>This partially fills in the letters gap mentioned above by going through the alphabet and teaching you how to say each sound. VERY GOOD - but, this would be more useful in a computer environment where you could see the letter flash on the screen. You can make your own flash cards, but by then you'd pretty much know the letters already. <
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>#6 - Greetings; Introductions; Jobs <
>Audio CD - does exactly what the title says. <
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>#7 - Telephone numbers; Age; Time/hours <
>Audio CD - does exactly what the title says. <
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>#8 - Shoppings & asking questions; Colors <
>Audio CD - does exactly what the title says. <
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>I hope this will help you understand your needs and make an informed decision about buying this product. My decision was not as informed, but maybe I can save you that trouble :). さようなら!

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Much Better!!
Much Better than the previous versions.. <
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>However, it seems like some of the characters are slightly squashed (either horizontally or vertically) in some sections of the software. I'd say that this is a rather annoying problem. The characters are certainly readable, but you sure wouldn't want to learn to write them like that!!! <
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>Further, this software runs at fixed resolutions. <
>1024x768 @ 32 bit color is the maximum it goes on my laptop. <
>But my laptop has a widescreen and runs at 1280x800. <
>Result? Annoying black borders on the sides of the screen. <
>Note that the squashed characters happens on both my desktop AND on my laptop. So its not a problem with my laptop's widescreen. <
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>Don't buy this software without buying a good quality headset first! You're going to want one anyway. Talking to Japanese people on Skype is also great practice. <
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>Also note that this software doesn't put you in a baby stroller and take you places. It seems like some people purchase the software and expect that. Its up to you to realize what you need to study. You CAN'T learn a language like Chinese or Japanese by relying on one educational source alone. Some people just seem so clueless about this. An example is that you won't learn much about the latest Japanese Pop music or about Akira Kurosawa in a college level Japanese language class. Yet, things like these are VERY important. You MUST use other sources when you're learning any language if you want to truely understand anything. I'm currently teaching myself Chinese and Japanese. <
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>I have a Japanese dictionary (Kodansha Furigana), I also have a Japanese Pen Pal, Japanese people to talk to on Skype, Dozens of Japanese movies, a bajillion bookmarks to Internet websites which have some good articles about the Japanese language, Japanese Manga, Japanese fansubbed Anime, a Japanese character workbook (practice writing), a Japanese dreamcast with Japanese games for it, and now I have some Japanese Software that actually works reasonably well. Do I stop there? Heck no... <
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>I still search regularly for other things which can supplement my Japanese learning. Having more sources makes things easier. Its all about a very active approach to learning. Learning Japanese, Chinese, or Korean (all of which I've studied to some degree) is not for lazy people. This software should be treated as just another learning source, and not as a definitive solution to learning Japanese. <
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