This is the place to discuss the new version of the Japanese course, which is totally revamped and replaces the original (deprecated) version.
Feedback on the new course (I’m about 15-16 hours in):
- General:
- A number of pronunciation glitches with double consonants. So far only ever one voice at a time.
- I hope you can include a “report sentence button” in future updates. Currently I would have to leave the app to report problems.
- When introducing a verb meaning “to have”, Robo-Aran helpfully explains that this verb is for a quite concrete kind of having, rather than for something like having a question or having the answer. The app then almost immediately prompts you with exactly those
- Things I like better than the old course:
- So far, it is never confusing. Sometimes the old course left me feeling pretty confused. .
- The vocabulary is practiced really thoroughly. It’s much easier to recall the vocabulary.
- Things that I like less than the old course.
- I really didn’t like it when the female voice would say the subject pronoun and the male wouldn’t for the first few hours of the course. I found it distracting. I can see arguments for including subject pronouns at the beginning or not; but regardless of what you choose, I would strongly prefer both voices to give the same answer.
- If the old course was probably a bit too hard, this one overcorrects IMO. If you’re aiming for Aran’s fabled 10% zone, then we can say that the old course was more like the 30% zone and this one is more like the 2% zone.
- Most importantly, it is less fun. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still quite enjoyable; but nothing like as much fun as the Italian course or the old Japanese course. It feels a bit “drilly”.
I only got a few hours into the old course, but already it had modal concepts like “can” and “want”, polite and casual forms of verbs, different tenses, negatives, questions, verbs of becoming, etc, etc, coming at you from all angles! It’s the authentic SSi experience to slowly watch the jigsaw gradually starting to take shape and make sense in this way IMO. I found it exhilarating!!!
In contrast, the new course has now introduced well over a dozen verbs in the same way: first it will introduce the polite, non-past form of the verb and practice that with several prompts interleaved with older material it is reviewing. Then it will introduce the negative and interrogative of the polite, non-past form of the verb in the same way. Occasionally, it will also introduce a negative interrogative of (you guessed it) the polite, non-past form of the verb. Then it will repeat this with the next new verb. And the next . And the next . And… No past-tense forms, no non-polite forms, no modals. After 15 hours of this, I’m finding it quite predictable and drilly.
It’s a big reason why it doesn’t push you into the 10% zone!
Much less importantly, but still worth mentioning: it also leads to more cases of less natural language. “Do you buy a coat?” is a perfectly grammatical question for the app to prompt me with; but it’s an odd thing to ask someone@. How likely am I to want to enquire about someone’s general coat-buying habits? In contrast, the kind of structures introduced so early (and so excitingly!) in the old course lend themselves to all kinds of natural sentences:
I didn’t buy the coat.
Do you want to buy the coat?
I can’t buy the coat today.
Etc.
@ Of course, it may be that the Japanese sentence actually means the much more natural, " Will you buy a coat?" I remember reading somewhere that Japanese has a non-past tense rather than a present tense. But I don’t know enough Japanese to confirm that and it’s not the English prompt the app gave.
From my rather basic experience learning Japanese, yes that’s the case. Expressions like kaimasu can mean “I buy” or “I will buy”.
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I understand, however this was one feature of the South Welsh Challenges I learned to appreciate. Cat would almost always say something, not necessarily actually formal, book Welsh, but closer to it, while Iestyn would drop bits of words and mess with the vowels more. For example, where Cat said chwarae, Iestyn would say ware, and where she said Dw i wedi he would say Dw i 'di.
This taught me in a very concise manner both what the full “correct” words are - so with a basic grasp of Welsh phonetics, I could take a stab at how to spell them and be able to find them in a dictionary - and what I’m likely to hear from many native speakers.
I don’t know Japanese, as despite best intentions I’ve had a rubbish few months and learned nothing, but probably it’s a similar thing. There are levels of “correctness” or formality; differences which can exist even between two people both speaking casually. You get to hear them together for the same English prompt, which helps you know that they mean exactly the same thing.
I believe it’s a part of Japanese culture that generally women will speak more politely and carefully than men - not entirely unlike English expectations, so I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions! So as long as it remains consistent, with the male voice being the one that drops more “unnecessary” parts of speech, and the female that sounds ever so correct, I think these particular variations can only be a benefit!
I really have to strongly disagree here. I think there are several important differences between the two situations. I’ll do my best to explain why I think that is; but even if you don’t buy my post hoc explanations (and I admit they might be wrong), I actually think the proof’s in the pudding in that I remember what you’re talking about and also found it useful, whereas I found this annoying and distracting rather than useful. So they are certainly not the same thing for me. Anyway and FWIW, here’s what I think is different:
Firstly, there’s no difference in core meaning between the two Welsh sentences, just in register. Although I don’t speak Japanese, my experience with languages that allow you to drop pronouns has been that there IS a significant difference in meaning when you use the pronoun. That means that what they did in the southern Welsh course caused a lot less distraction.
Secondly, We’re not talking about a shorter version of the same word, but rather the addition of a whole extra (rather long!) word that completely changes the rhythm of the sentence, with the longer version explicitly being the non-neutral version. So again your Welsh example involved a lot less distraction.
Thirdly, whether it’s because it’s a it’s a language unrelated to English or because of the AI voices, that bit about the rhythm is important. I find it’s much harder and takes much more concentration to parse word boundaries in the Japanese course compared to the Welsh courses. So once again, the Welsh example involves a lot less distraction.
Fourthly, unlike with your example in the Welsh course, nothing is gained by having the two voices say different things. You are not being exposed to two different equally valid versions of the same thing; you’re being exposed to two different sentences. And there really does have to be a reason, because I think it’s easy to underestimate the effect of this extra cognitive load, especially when you’re introducing new things.
When a word has failed to stick for me with other courses in the past, it’s amazing how often it turns out that the word was introduced together with something else. Sometimes two versions are introduced at once. Sometimes an extra tidbit of information about it is given at the same time as introducing it. Or sometimes it just happens to have triggered a connection in my mind that distracted me, basically anything that distracts me in that initial presentation moment. And the downstream effects can last for days or even weeks. My experience teaching students English is that I’m not unusual in this regard.
Finally, it’s not just occasional sentences like in your example; it’s every single sentence. Every single sentence for the first few hours has two versions. Therr really does need to be a good reason for this and I don’t think there is. All in all, I think this would be better handled by having some sentences with the pronouns (both voices) and some without (again both voices). That way, the student isn’t trying to either supply two sentences for one prompt or to mentally suppress one sentence in favor of the other (both operations that greatly increase the cognitive load).
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Yesterday, a very interesting new structure was introduced: Subordinate clauses. This is pretty exciting. It’s quite difficult so I’m enjoying this very much. I also forgot to say that I really like the change to using romanji.
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Ooh, what colour belt are you on? I can see I’m going to have to push on a bit faster! I’ve done various Japanese courses before, but I don’t remember subordinate clauses making much of an appearance. That’s exciting!
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As far as I can tell, I seem to be blue. Although the app offers me the black belt every time I start a new session for some strange reason.
So far, it’s just structures with " believe": “I believe that this is true.”
I guess I should clarify that I’m only assuming it’s a subordinate clause in Japanese, because it’s a subordinate clause in English. I guess it’s possible that it’s not a subordinate clause in Japanese. I know the grammar structures don’t always line up neatly.
Regardless, you are right that it is exciting, because it is definitely a very different structure and nothing at all like what I’m used to in other languages.
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I’m now about 40% into the Level with a blue belt with a black band and it’s still the same. It just keeps feeding in new verbs and nouns (following the exact same schedule I outlined in the previous post) with no new structures. Even the structure with “believe” seems to have fallen away. I’m also feeling frustrated at not learning any informal verb forms yet after investing so much time. I only got 4 hours into the old course and it had already introduced some.
This new course is definitely less fun than any SSI course I have seen before (including the Italian course, which I enjoyed and the old Japanese course, which I was enjoying for all its insane difficulty). In fact, it’s so unlike an SSI course that I genuinely wonder if it can possibly be what was intended?
I can’t make up my mind whether to give it a bit longer, quit Japanese or go back to the old course. I’m leaning towards that last option, but it means losing so many hours of progress.
Yes, and no. Time spent practising a language isn’t ever really lost, in that it has been firmly fixing those patterns into your long term memory and you’ll be able to incorporate them into your new learning. I know what you mean, but if you return to the old course, the new one will have given you a springboard in.
Hi Deborah-SSi, I’ve started the revamped Japanese course and am about to start the orange belt level. I am enjoying the pace of the course (I found the previous version too fast for me), and find the web app straightforward to use, though, as has been reported elsewhere I too am seeing messages about reaching brown belt when I am nowhere near that. This doesn’t seem to affect the lessons themselves as they are presented in the right order regardless.
Thanks for all the hard word that SSI are doing on creating such a valuable learning tool. I’m also giving the French course a go and that too is fantastic! I love Aran’s snippets of advice dotted through the lessons - for me they are a valuable resource in themselves in helping me to form a better understanding of what learning is really about - and discard some out of date ideas.
I have a couple of questions which someone with more Japanese knowledge might be able to help me with:
- When working with benkyou, it seems to flit between benkyou shite imasu and benkyou wo shite imasu. Is this an error, or is it something I am not understanding?
- the words mada and sukoshi sometimes appear in front of the noun (nihongo) and sometimes in front of the verb (hanashimasu). Does that mean the placing of these words can be used either way?
Thank you.
Mike
I haven’t noticed that myself, though I don’t tend to look closely at the text. From my Japanese study, it should just be benkyou shite imasu
There is a little flexibility in Japanese word order when it comes to adverbs, so don’t worry if you say it one way and the answer comes back the other. In general though Japanese is fairly formulaic in the way it constructs sentences. (Someone I knew once claimed they had memorised 25 Japanese sentences and could get by in Japan using those in every situation 
)
Tthank you.
As luck would have it, the course has finally opened out at the purple belt level and I’m much happier. The subordinate clause with “believe” is back and there are structures with gerunds and also with “need” and “want”. It feels like an SSi course again now.
Is interesting to read the feedback above and how different it is from my experience. I genuinely think you should look at the course content before the purple belt and add some grammatical variation. It must be more than 20 hours of nothing but short, simple sentences in the polite form of the non-past tense. To me, it felt more like Glossika than SSi.
That’s not to say I don’t want to praise anything. To give just one example, your spaced repetition is really on point. I’ve never had such a painless experience remembering vocabulary for any non-European language.
Anyway, I’m pretty happy now. It’s finally getting into the same kind of stuff the old course was doing. It feels (like) fun again rather than a drill.
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@martin-harte I think it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of someone who has never attempted to learn another language before, or perhaps just a bit of traditional French in school. For those of us with other language learning experience, it may start off a little slow and, dare I say it?, a bit boring, but with the updated Revisit/Skip functionality on the very near horizon, we will at least have the option of skipping on ahead. People with a lot less experience in language learning, will have the opportunity to get a slower start, build confidence, and then move into the more challenging aspects. Best of both worlds 
My feedback was not so much that it’s too easy (although I did find it too easy TBH), but rather that it’s just not an SSi course until at least the purple belt IMHO. I haven’t seen any other SSI course where you have done that. Even in the very earliest iterations (the old Welsh courses before you made the challenges and long before Automagic), while you used to sometimes spend a whole lesson on a single structure, you wouldn’t spend 20 hours on it. All I would say is just try it out for yourself. If you still think I’m wrong after that, then of course I’ll accept your judgement.
Anyway, I didn’t come here to be negative, because I actually enjoyed the purple and brown belts quite a lot. I actually came here to share how happy I am with the black belt level. Once you hit black belt, it suddenly all goes kind of mental! It’s so challenging, I’m getting tons wrong and it’s an exhilarating rush of learning at a ludicrous speed. This is the SSi I know and love!
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I’m just shy of 83 hours now. I’m going to need to put it on the back burner soon, as I have other stuff to prioritise; but it’s been fun. My goal is to reach 100 hours (matching the SSi Japanuary team’s 10 days of 10 hours) and then go back and watch the videos again to see how much I understand. At the current rate, that should be a little less than 2 more weeks.
Feedback on the course:
- I’m pretty happy with it, especially from blackbelt level on.
- So far, the errors don’t seem to cause insurmountable problems.
- Some regular error patterns I have noticed include:
Confusion of “wa” and “ha” at the beginning of words.
When a new item is introduced, the short phrases containing it that immediately follow almost always lack markers (such as “wa”, “ga” and “wo”). The markers are almost always back in the longer practice phrases.
There are a lot of weird pronunciations of double consonants (e.g. inserting vowels) and of the “ds” combination.