Features

The first thing you have to do at the main screen is choose a title. My japanese program had 4 initial titles: ‘Japan:The island empire’, ‘Essential Japanese signs’, ‘Survival phrases for Japanese’, and ‘the most common words in japanese’. Each of these titles opens its selected page in a dialogue window. The first title opens a narrative about the history of Japan written in Roma-ji (Japanese sounds written in Roman Alphabet) which can be heard spoken aloud, and the meaning of each word or sentence seen by clicking. Each title opens a similarly made page – information in Roma-ji both written and spoken, with English meanings available for individual words or whole phrases along with whether the word is a noun or a verb etc and what the root Japanese word is.

Other choices on the main page are games, listen and speak, or conversation practice.

The listen and speak section plays individual words or phrases from the selected title and asks you to repeatthem into the microphone, grading your performance on its meter, with grades of ‘Wow,’ ‘good job,’ or ‘keep practicing’.

The conversation practice provides you with a situation on a picture or video with someone asking a question. The question is spoken aloud and you must respond with an answer. The computer helps you find the answer if you are unsure and gives hints and the meaning in english before giving the whole answer away in japanese.

The games are standard fare of crosswords, gapfill, and sentence reordering.

Effectiveness

The best part of this course, for me, is the conversation practice. It allows you to practice different vocabulary for different situations and will give you as much or as little help as you need. It begins with someone asking you a question, for example: in a train station someone will ask you what time the next train is in Japanese. You must give the correct response into the microphone. There are several options that you can toggle on or off that can make answering easier: you can choose whether or not to see the conversation text in Roma-ji (trabsliterated Japanese), receive a prompt or the actual translation of your answer (in English), or your expected response in Roma-ji. This is a useful and quite engaging exercise, as it allows you to hear the language but also forces you to form an answer; even if you use the hints it is a useful process to form and actually speak an answer. Some other nice additions to this are being able to choose which part in the dialogue you wish to take, and being able to play back your own voice and compare it to a native speaker’s reading of the same line. The situations included in the three of the four titles that have the conversation practice are varied in and increase slowly in difficulty.

Each section also contains passages of Japanese about the chosen title (Japanese history etc), with videos and photographs to go alongside. The passages are written in Rom-ji and the student can click on each section or word and get a meaning for the segment or the individual word, or even the root of the word. This is very useful as a comprehension exercise for students who have learnt some Japanese already. It is often the first page encountered from the main title page though and I find it very difficult (although possible I am sure) to learn a language from scratch through the reading and translating of passages.

The listen and speak section, as most similar titles for me, was interesting for a short while, until the novelty of hearing your own voice wears off. This version, although possibly not the best voice recognition software, does offer more than just checking your pronunciation. It will check both your word and sentence pronunciation and also check how good your word and sentence dictation is by asking you to write the meaning of a spoken word or phrase. This is okay, but it is difficult to get the exact words sometimes, and it too loses its appeal after time.

The final section is the games. These are standard word games but do give you some options: you can change the speed, the range of segments from the title to be covered, and even which parts of speech you wish to concentrate on. As games go, they are aren’t too bad at all.

Most of the Learn Japanese Now course is actually quite good, but here is the main problem I have with it, and it is found throughout the course: The sole use of Roma-ji for all of the writing means that you can never learn writing though this course and for a software course I feel that this is an opportunity lost. There is no Kanji Japanese script at all and even the games and the dictation require you to learn the spelling of the Roma-ji words. Although transliteration can always be a very useful tool to learn a new language, spending time on learning how to spell these transliterations can be seen as a waste of time.

Without being able to learn reading and writing, then a software course loses one of its main weapons against the audio courses. They don’t have too many weapons to being with.

I do feel as well, that Learn Japanese Now would be very difficult as the only course for a complete beginner of the language. It should be used as a supplement or a later addition to something else.

Longevity

The longevity of this package is of course limited due to its lack of reading and writing of the official Kanji script. Also, the games and the listen and speak section are limited: The games may be more interesting than some as they use pictures and have more options than most; the listen and speak is not the best available but again has some good options. The conversation practice is good and holds the package together along with the comprehension passages. However both are possibly difficult and inappropriate for beginners and I feel would be of greater benefit as a supplement to another (probably audio) course. As a supplement the course’s lifespan would be increased as it could be used as a reference and vocabulary builder. The comprehension paragraphs provide plenty of information for a student and can be used to check and bolster vocabulary for a long time.

Ease of Use

As far as Software courses go, Transparent’s Learn Japanese Now is quite easy to use. It is not a very big programme and has clear menus and options to choose from. The only possibly confusing part is the drop down windows menu at the top which gives some vague words. This is not a problem though as this does not really have to be used.

Cost

The Learn Japanese Now course is very good value for money. On its own it is probably not enough to learn a foreign language, but at the very cheap price of about $70 it could easily be paired with an audio course. You could of course go for the Transparent complete course (which Lingualogue will be reviewing soon) which includes this package as well as the everywhere audio and the BYKI flashcard programme, for the same price as most other software packages alone.