Rosetta Stone has some very interesting things going for it. From being sold all over the place to their “unique” selling proposition of being the perfect way to learn a new language. I got it a long time ago, and to be honest found a bit of success.

Over the last year my study of Japanese has tapered off, well stopped. From “life” and work to forgetting to study I just got out of practice. Recently, I have gotten the bug again and decided I wanted to do something differently from normal to jump back into studying, I decided lets give Rosetta Stone a shot again.

The Good

Game LikeI think one of the strong points is it can almost be like a game at times when you are given text and spoken language and you choose a picture. It forces you to make connections and find context based on what you see. This is very good for learning vocab because you get a bit of context.

Spoken LanguageFor a long time my weakness has been, and still is, listening comprehension. While I can get phrases, and small basic words fairly simply, when it comes to any type of conversation count me out. With everything having spoken language it really helps me practice listening and has gotten my ear going again.

Level CompletionWhen I first got Rosetta Stone I could never get past Level 1 – Unit 1 – Lesson 1. I honestly thought the thing was broken. After coming back to it I zoomed through all of level 1 – Unit 1, and am now 80% of the way through Level 1 – Unit 2 with still more to go I can do. With something like 11 units for Level 1 I have a long way to go.

A Lot to ReviewI’ll be honest from a business perspective I can understand why Rosetta Stone is so expensive ($379 on Amazon at 20% off). The shear amount of content there is is staggering, and they had to pay someone to develop the content, hire speaker to speak for hours, not to mention cost of software developers. There is a lot there and I am no longer bitter about the price, just annoyed(lol).

The Bad

Repetitive Actions Granted this is the nature of the beast and how you learn in a lot of ways, but you kind of get into a bit of tunnel vision when doing it where after a while the task is so repetitive you almost forget what you are doing and just start clicking, without paying attention.

Writing System While it is awesome you can choose to review in romaji, hiragana, and kanji they don’t actually teach you anything about it. They need a quick primer on hiragana and kanji to get you started. I know they have their “context is king” mentality, but sometimes an intro is a good thing. Also wish they wouldn’t allow romaji.

The Ugly

Grammar The biggest problem there is with Rosetta Stone is grammar. While the speaker and text are using great grammar if you don’t have a basic understanding you will spend hours struggling to make connections. Even a basic review of grammar can considerably speed up what you get out Rosetta Stone, but alas nothing like that is available in app.

Conclusion

If you have Rosetta Stone, or can get it for cheap, I recommend it as a complement to everything else you do. As an all out replacement, absolutely not. I do think there is value with it, but not enough to justify the cost for those who don’t have the money to throw down for it. It might be a good buy for the jet-setter who just wants to learn another language while on a plane, but if you want to get fluent and really flourish with the language I would use other resources first.

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From the creator or Tae-Kims guide to Japanese for the iPhone here is a guest post by a friend of mine, Ronald Timoshenko. This is a bit about his new application Japanese Alphabet Study Guide and why he decided to write it.

History

After completing the “Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese” app (or just “Learning Japanese”), I decided that I wanted to make an app that would be a great complement to the excellent content already written by Tae Kim. Grammar and special expressions are thoroughly covered in Tae Kim’s guide. So, I wanted to create something that could be used along-side that would assist users in learning Japanese in some way. That’s when I came up with the idea of the “Japanese Alphabet Study Guide”. Learning the Kana (Hiragana & Katakana) is one of the first steps in learning the language. And, since Romaji isn’t used in Tae Kim’s guide, it seemed like a great place to start. I decided to include Kanji as well because I wanted the app to continue to be useful, even after users had mastered the Kana.

Filling the Gap

I looked at some of what appeared to be the more popular Kana/Kanji apps and tried to include in my own app what users felt was lacking in others (based on the reviews they were leaving). Ultimately, I decided not to include everything I initially wanted to before releasing the app. It’s important to make sure the app is well-received before spending exorbitant amounts of development time on something nobody will use. Despite that fact, someone suggested I even reduce the functionality that I had already created, pointing out that perhaps I was trying to squeeze too much in the initial release. I would certainly like to build on what’s in this release (i.e., Kanji stroke order and stroke animations), but that all depends on how many people decide to download it. Such a thing is a significant effort, and as already mentioned, it makes little sense to invest in something that won’t be used (I’m reminded of the YAGNI programming mantra: You Ain’t Gonna Need It).

Personal Opinion

I think I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I’m kind of partial to going through the “Multiple Choice” mode with my own Kanji lists (you can create your own) and seeing how well I really know my Kanji. A “Flashcard” mode is also available, but you can’t say “Yeah, I think I know that one” with multiple choice. It’s either right or wrong, no “maybes”.

Anyway, I can tell you what I think of it, but I’m obviously going to be a bit biased. Try it out and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear some feedback. Thanks for reading.

Thanks

Links

• Learning Japanese
• Japanese Alphabet Study Guide

Images

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Being a developer on the Microsoft stack, which I love, me getting a mac is pretty big. Well recently I purchased one so I can do some iPad/iPhone development on, which I own neither. Anyway I have spent the last couple of weeks looking for software that is comparable to what I use on my Windows computer(s).

One of the big things I looked into first is stuff for Japanese, and for the most part it has been a success finding what I need/want. Most of what I do is in the browser so no real problems until I started looking for a desktop based English/Japanese dictionary since over the next semester I will be on a bus with no internet for 12 hours a week.

First I tried to integrate some dictionarys into the built in dictionary app with little to no success. Next I searched for some free alternatives, with no success. I even went so far as to looking into coding my own interface for JMDict. After realizing that I could I should first search for something else, and it lead me to Jisho, fitting name, from SugoiSoft. I have to say the $14 dollars it cost well worth the money and time it saved me in writing my own so I bought it quickly.

Review

Having gone through all the background lets look at the product. This is a pretty normal dictionary app, but because it is using JMDict as its source it is very powerful in its material you can search for. Here is a list of features. I have bolded what I like the most.

• Search in your Native Tongue (English, French, German, Russian)
• Search from Anywhere (No internet required)
• OS X Integration
• International
• Lists
• Romanization
• Variable Strength
• Wildcard Searching

Let me breakdown each of the features I like and why, the others are good but I don’t necessarily “need” or notice them personally. As you can tell most of the features I like.

Search from Anywhere

This next semester I will be going to the main campus of my college 4 days a week which is over an hour away one way. I “plan” to do my homework on the bus instead of wasting that amount of time just doing nothing. Since I have no internet during that time I need a better dictionary available to me so this app is going to help so I don’t rely on the internet so much for looking up words, plus it will make it quicker during class.

OS X Integration

I am not sure if Jisho integrates with spotlight, yet, but it doesn’t seem to. So this feature kind of threw me for a loop at first. However, I found that once I turned on a setting I can right click on some text somewhere and search for it in Jisho instantly instead of copy+paste.

Lists

This feature I never would have had if I rolled my own solution and has already proven its value. I can make lists of words I frequently look up, or words I want to remember. One day if I get really motivated maybe make a list of all the JLPT words.

Romanization

Firstly, if you know me you know how much I hate romaji, but this feature combined with “OS X Integration” is valuable helping other people that still use romaji, and unfortunately that is a lot. Also don’t tell anyone, but a couple of times I have used romaji for a quick reference so that is nice.

Wildcard Searching

This one is nice. I hate doing search algorithms so I appreciate them when search is done well and I can say this is nice from the users perspective. It works and I have yet to not be able to find a word. The wild card features is especially nice for those words you can only remember parts of words or you don’t know the reading for a particular kanji

Final Thoughts

This is a great front-end for JMDict and is a lot better than what I would have been able to make. Because of everything available in the JMDict data it can be diffcult to bring forward that data easily for everyone to use and access. Jisho does it elegantly and makes the data access very quick and easy. The designer really did a good job of making sure things work well with each other. You can get a free trial to try it out at the Jisho Website.

If you use a desktop based dictionary what do you use and why do you like it?

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There are many SRS applications people can use to memorize things, but Anki is the best for a variety of reasons. Before, I do a list of reasons some other alternatives for SRS are Mnemosyne, SuperMemo, Surusu, Smart.FM, and even ReadTheKanji.com. I have used all these besides supermemo, and anki is really the only one that fits all my needs.

A quick list of reasons Anki’s is the best:

• Client Version
• Online Version
• Sync Between the Two
• Sync Between Multiple Computer’s with Client
• Detailed Statistics
  • Daily
  • Short Term
  • Long Term
• Audio Cards
• Developer/Plugin Support

As you can tell probably the biggest reason I think Anki is the best is the portability of the Decks.  They can be done from multiple locations multiple computers online and offline.  To me this was very important because I use anywhere from 2 to 5 computers with varying degrees of connections online and I didn’t want not having an internet connection to be the reason I don’t study.  Plus there is an online version so if you are at a public computer you can use it too.

Here is a quick rundown of how to setup and use the online sync.

First here is an example of pre-made decks you can download automatically so you don’t have to make them.

First click on settings and preferences

Next add your Username and Password for your account or follow the link to Create a Free Account in the Network tab

You can easily download your deck just File -> Download -> Personal Deck

Just select the deck you want and hit OK.

The daily stats are really nice for seeing what and how you have done.

The long term and short term Graphs are good to see a visual Representation of progress. I tend to be really into analyzing progress and statistics of what i am doing to try to optimize my learning.  One thing that is beneficial to me is to actually see how much time a day I do study, and how much time total I have spent too.

Another point that I like is the Audio cards, now this isn’t “new” exactly a few others have this features, but not all of them.  It is important because if you can use it especially for expressions to better understand them.

For me the final important feature of Anki is the the plug-in architecture that allows developers to create plug-ins when they get that itch of “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do…”.  There are a lot of plug-ins available and the best on of them for me is the Japanese one. Visit Joe In Japan‘s blog post Sentence Mining Explained for a good tutorial on how to install and use it.

While everyones needs are different when it comes to SRS I feel that Anki truely has all the features that are needed.  It has the best of everything and takes somethings a step further, statistics for example.  I didn’t use anki for a long time because it seemed a bit too complicated and confusing for what it was and that is why I preferred other applications, but the sync and statistics limitations on the  others killed me.

What do you like/prefer to use for SRS application. I am always looking for more to try.

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