TOPICS ENTERTAINMENT Instant Immersion Japanese Deluxe (Windows)

Rating:
Summary: Useless to anyone not in their 3rd or 4th year of Japanese
Review: It has 8 cds, 3 of them are purely audio.

There are no printed instructions, and no disk marked as 'Hey, start here!'

You're basically left to wonder what to do.

There is a program to install a software that's called "Tell Me More". That CD is marked as Beginner, so it seems the place to start.

I'm not sure whose definition of Beginner that is, but you're given a colorful screen which reminds me of books for a 5 year old. Is there something wrong with simple, functional menus that tell you just what you need to click on and just what to expect when you do click on it?

Here is the single worst decision in the program - Where do you start?
One would think that, buying a program to learn Japanese language, you'd start at some kind of page 1 thing where you learn the basic sounds of the language, practice a few samples which are written in a roman alphabet phonetic, next to actual Japanese. Something like 'apple' to learn how A is pronounced, etc., learn a few Kanji characters or something.

No, nothing like that. With no real idea where you're to start, you can try randomly clicking one of the 'lessons'. I did so, and I was presented with a series of one or two sentence Japanese dialogues, no English anywhere near to tell me what it was I was trying to say. I was then supposed to speak these in to a microphone. Great, I may as well be mumbling to the dog, because I have no idea what I'm saying!!

Click on other 'puzzles' and you're given a picture, and next to that three Japanese descriptions. You're supposed to select ct A, B or C, I assume picking the description that matches the picture. And this is the Beginner disk?
What can I expect in the Intermediate disk???
How would the Beginner have even the slightest idea? No English anywhere. Ok.
What do I do now?
Unistall and return to the vendor, that's what.

This is the craziest, most useless set of mismatched disks I've ever seen.
But then again, I've yet to come across any popular education software that was of any value, so it's par for the course.