Instant Immersion Japanese

Rating:
Summary: Good for a program without a book
Review: I have gone through 10 of these lessons before my car was stolen, where I kept the CDs. I'll be repurchasing this set.
My listening and speaking ability became pretty good for not having attended a formal class with a teacher.
Sometimes, some sentences are too long so that I have to rewind often, that's a lot of re-listening when you have a CD player that can only rewind to the beginning of the lesson. It's good to have a Japanese-English book to look up some words. The good thing is that this program prevents you from pronouncing words wrong. Once you master a lesson, you find that you can create sentences (not generated in the lesson conversations) based on what you've learned.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent program
Review: I have the version of this set with the 8 CD's, which includes 5 CD's of multi-media lesson materials, and 3 CD's of audio material. This is a lot of stuff, as there are about 120 exercies just on the 5 multi-media based disks, which is probably equivalent to at least the first year of study and maybe the first two years.

Although there are a lot of nice features to this course, the most useful thing is the ability to record your own voice and compare your pronunciation with the native speaker's using the digital speech analyzer technology. It takes a little while to learn how to use it effectively, but you'll pick that up with a little practice. This is a very cool feature and was extremely helpful.

The other multi-media exercises include answering questions based on a video that you're shown with a running narration, multiple-choice questions where you respond verbally as well as in written form (using the phonetic transliterations, of course), synonym and antonym vocabulary-matching drills, word-order drills for both speaking and writing, pronunciation exercises for individual letters, words, and phrases, grammar discussions, and even crossword puzzles. Each CD has two series of review exercises which you can choose to go through or not as you please. The course is also customizable in terms of speaking, writing, reading, in terms of which exercises you want to complete. For example, if your main interest is speaking and don't care about writing, you can deselect those exercises in the configuration menu. There is also a "daily diary" function that tracks your progress as you go. You can also adjust such things as whether the program gives you hints or clues, how fast the native speaker speaks, and so on.

Another nice aspect of this program is that a lot of thought has gone into designing the computer interface. For example, If you forget a word during a drill or don't know a word, you can just put the mouse cursor on it and a definition pops up. I found myself using this feature quite often during the various exercises. You can also just pop over to the dictionary from there and back if you want to.

This program really is like being in your own personalized classroom environment, and another major advantage is you can progress at your own pace. I usually try to put in an hour a day regularly on the class. I would estimate this will still take you 4-6 months to complete the entire CD course.

A brief word about using the program on your computer. Only one of the CD's actually installs on your hard disk, which is the Install/Beginner disk. After that, when you're finished with that disk and are ready to move onto the Beginner 2 one, the Intermediate disk, and so on, you just put the new one in and the program starts from there. I would prefer that the entire course just install on your hard disk, since it runs faster that way, but it's okay the way it is.

I am enjoying this course and all in all it's a feature-packed and effective program that will get you up to an intermediate level of proficiency quickly and will prepare you for more advanced language study after completing this one.