Currently in alpha testing - watch this space!
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Music to my ears! I’ve picked up Japanese off and on since I was a teenager - I can read and understand more than I can speak, but it was so hard to get speaking practise, which is likely why my study was so patchy.
Looking forward to it!
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I’ve dabbled in Japanese on and off as well, ever since my son at the age of 5 decided he wanted to learn Japanese after seeing it on TV. I learnt with him to help him practise, then I did a year full time at a tertiary college, but that was a while ago now and I haven’t used it a lot. I do a little in Duolingo every day though, just to keep some of it fresh in my mind.
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The latest news on SSi Japanese from @aran :
If you’d like to play along with us, Tom, Kai and I will be doing a 10 day Japanese intensive (we’re calling it Japanuary!) from the 13th to the 23rd of January - we’ll be livecasting a bit at the end of each day and then setting up some chances to let everyone practise in shared video sessions at the end. There’ll be updates on the forum and (less frequently) via email.
Who’s interested? 
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It sounds interesting, but what it is it? I’ve seen “intensives” mentioned before, but never with a hint of how they work. Other than, presumably, being intense. 
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Possibly interested, depending on the time commitment.
I did a few months of evening class Japanese about 30 years ago when I was planning to work over there, with a Korean teacher in Derbyshire, but I never went there to work, so pretty much dropped it altogether and never reached any level even of basic fluency. No doubt there’s some sticky residue of it left, but it should be a useful test of the SSI method for me.
I’m not used to a time discipline any more, but the ten-day arrangement may actually suit me, so I hope it’ll be possible to join.
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We’ll be in an AirBnB within walking distance of Glandwr - you’re welcome to come up and play, or just hammer away at it at home and hop on some of the live group video practice calls we’re hoping to do at the end of each day - that’s Tom’s baby, I’m not really on top of those details 
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Thanks for the offer of joining you Glandwrside. I’m sure it would be great fun and I’d be interested to join you for part of the time, if that would work.
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Absolutely, any time that works for you! 
Japanese beta is live! I can’t try it out myself as I’m taking part in Japanuary next week, but I believe @Deborah-SSi will be giving it a go this week. Please let me know of any issues you encounter!
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I was on “I want to become able to speak Japanese” (yellow belt white stripe) when the audio cut out but the text kept going.
It is entirely possible it was my internet playing up and there was just more text than sound buffered, but maybe worth a check?
By the way, the text showing up in hiragana is cool. So far I can’t read a single syllable, so it’s as good as not having words on the screen at all. 
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That sounds like it might be some kind of small glitch in the app - the sound files seem intact! But please let us know if it happens again, and any patterns you notice 
(personally I’ve noticed that sometimes turning off the screen, moving between apps or on the web app moving between tabs causes weird stuff like this sometimes)
Yes - we originally had to use hiragana because the Text-to-speech voices struggled with pronouncing kanji correctly whenever there wasn’t enough context, but as a nice side effect you might start to recognise or at least become more familiar with the hiragana so that it’s easier to learn later.
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Sometimes the app says “Japanese” is something like Nihongo wo, others Nihongo ga. I know nothing of the romanisations and am in no hurry to learn, so… sorry not sorry, I’ll try my best with approximations of what I hear.
My sister thinks the ga is correct, and doesn’t know what the wo is doing there. (Doesn’t help that it’s in “sentences” like I Japanese now, which sure doesn’t make sense in English, but maybe is a sensible sentence fragment in Japanese?)
When ga was first introduced, the Japanese voices ignored it and said wo. Now sometimes they say ga but I haven’t worked out a pattern yet.
I do not trust AI and that’s already spoiling the experience. Every time something is unexpected my first thought isn’t that I’m learning a new thing. Instead I wonder how high the chance is that it’s just total rubbish. Should I be absorbing this for later, or ignoring it?
I really want to be supportive, but…
The male voice has weird intonation that’s noticeable even not knowing the language. There’s a particularly long pause during I speak - “watashi wa … hanashimas.” (I suspect it could be connected to men using watashi less than women, in casual settings?)
It all feels a bit Not Right.
The intro voice said to listen to the native speakers. There are none. Even “he” isn’t real, is he? (Apologies if he is, but if so he really needs to improve his reading aloud skills.) And if that’s the best AI can do with English, which has been the main focus of development… it doesn’t inspire a whole mountain of confidence. 
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I don’t speak Japanese, so massive pinch of salt needed here, but I think they are case markers. IIRC “ga” is for the subject when the subject is not also the topic of the sentence (and “wa” is used when it is the topic) and “o” is used to mark the object (and “wo” could plausibly be some phonetic variant of that).
If I’m not totally wrong about this (which is entirely possible ha ha), it’s’s kind of similar to how you might say, “Der Student kann gehen” but “Ich sehe den Studenten.” in German, except that the case markers are particles rather than suffixes in Japanese.
Hopefully, I haven’t got this wrong.
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Well, thank you. A reasonably supported guess is better than my total lack of knowledge.
I learnt some Japanese long time ago in evening classes. From what I can remember “wo”, very often pronounced as “o” is the marker for accusativ, the object.
And you are right in your guess, that “watashi wa” is often omitted.
My question is: from what I can remember, the verb is always at the end of the sentence. But there were some sentences with " issho ni" after “desu”. And the sound is a bit weird, as if the “issho ni” was stuck later.
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Be a subscriber. Install the new app. When it opens it has two drop-down menus: “I speak…” and “I want to learn…” Choose English for the first and Japanese (Beta) for the second.
You can install the app and make a start without being a subscriber. You’ll get to learn for a short while (half an hour or so?) and then it will say you’ve reached the end of the free material. At that point it will loop, generating random phrases with what you’ve already learned, as practice, for as long as you like. To get it to teach you new words beyond that point you must pay up.
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No, one subscription covers you for any or all languages, and you can learn as intensively (or not) as you choose. Just make sure that you’re in the current version of the app or website, where you see the language choices @verity-davey described.
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Hey @verity-davey - thank you for your comments! It’s very useful to get some first impressions from people who don’t speak Japanese as well.
My very limited understanding is that Japanese is a bit like Finnish in the sense that words get changed a bit based in how they are used in the sentence, as @martin-harte described more precisely (although I also can’t say how accurate that is and I won’t look into it - I’m not meant to be learning Japanese until next week, ;)) With stuff like “I Japanese now”, just have a go. It’ll be in there because it builds up to a sentence in Japanese and it’s just extra practice - it doesn’t matter if you get it right or not. We might remove it if it causes too much confusion though, so thanks for flagging it up!
My main advice is don’t worry about it. Grammar is weird in all langauges and we always leave stuff out that your brain will just have to figure out over time. Any listening and speaking work you do will smooth out any small issues that may be currently present in the course. Even the Welsh course which we’ve been working on for 15 years still has mistakes in it, so we don’t expect them to be completely gone anytime soon in any course.
What I can tell you is that we don’t rely entirely on AI, so while there will be mistakes - especially while we’re in early beta - the course is looked at by humans before release and there are many non-AI programs as part of the course which try to make sure the content comes out as we want it.
Oh, and about the voices! They are clones of real native speakers (most of the time - Finnish didn’t have any native clones for example, but they still sound very good!), hence the initial phrasing 
But I do agree that it sounds a bit weird 
The male voice just has a tendency to speak slowly sometimes, which is part of the reason he was chosen. It makes it a bit easier to hear the separate chunks in the early stages, even if it’s not how someone would naturally speak
Hope this helps, and let us know how it goes!
Also @brigitte, I can’t help you! @Deborah-SSi, do you know what’s happening, or if it’s something fix?
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