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. 
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.
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.
I’m really keen to try this out - having learned how to understand (some, fairly significant) Japanese over the 8 years in the 20th century visiting our engineering teams out there. But mainly because: 1/ I never could or at least would SPEAK much Japanese; 2/ I have a similar experience of understanding a lot of spoken Cymraeg after some intermittent times in years using SaySomethingInWelsh and living here in Gwynedd AND still not speaking much Welsh; 3/ So maybe this new intensive approach will show me that it can work for my spoken Japanese - and then I can maybe apply it seriously to my Cymraeg. … HOW do I get access?
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.
Thanks… Hopefully I haven’t misinterpreted - and this reply is relevant to my jchowes post. I am a monthly-paid subscriber to Say Something in Welsh. Do I need to subscribe to an additional service for the intensive 10 days of Japanese (Jan 13 onwards for 10 days) ?
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.
Now that is easy to do, thank you both. Given that the intensive learning method is actually a case of putting the effort in to use the standard app “intensively” … I should just power-up my efforts and do that with my Welsh studies… It was nice to switch on the Japanese option and be able to use my 30 year old memories of all the words. But I will get back to making it happen in Cymraeg.
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? 
@jchowes no, SSi has one subscription which gives you access to everything. As long as you use the new app - SaySomethingin - or app.saysomethingin.com - you can use any of the languages, and take part in the Japanuary intensive.
@verity-davey @brigitte @martin-harte
To those asking about nihongo ga and nihongo (w)o, Japanese has ‘particles’ which go after the word and indicate how it’s being used. They’re a bit like case markers, but not always. ga tends to indicate the main topic of a sentence, and wo (pronounced o) indicates an object, but you’ll hear others and, in the SSi way, learn to use them in context.
That means that sometimes you’ll hear nihongo ga, sometimes nihongo o and sometimes, as you’ve probably noticed nihongo de. It all depends on how the word Japanese is being used in the sentence, but if you say the wrong one, when it’s the short phrases, don’t worry as you’ll get used to which one as you practise the longer phrases.
Yes, Japanese tends to omit personal pronouns if they’re obvious, and male speakers don’t tend to use watashi wa. There are some differences between male and female speech in Japan, but they’re not huge and as a non-native speaker, you’ll be forgiven pretty much everything!
From the Japanese I’ve learnt, yes, the verb always goes at the end, so I’ve questioned the adding of words like isshoni on the end too. We’re having those little details checked by a fluent Japanese speaker, and the course will be modified if necessary, but in the longer phrases it’s generally in the right place.
From how the intensive day of Italian worked, I think what will happen is there’ll be a link posted here to a YouTube livestream each day from the 13th to 23rd of January. We can then watch and listen along as Kai, Tom, and Aran use the app to learn as much Japanese as possible for roughly 10 hours each day.
Or, we can choose to join in fully by using our own apps, from something like 9am each day through to the end. (I watched a bit of the Italian, and trying to learn with the livestream on would do my head in. YMMV, but if you’re at all like me and you want to learn Japanese rather than just watch someone else out of morbid curiosity, I’d suggest you go solo. Just run the app all day and check in at the end.)
Then hopefully in the evening there will be a link to a video chat, where everyone who has joined in can use what they’ve learned to attempt having actual conversations. By the end of the full 10 day intensive, if your brain isn’t just mush, theoretically you’ll have learned Japanese for close to 100 hours, so that last group video chat ought to go pretty well! I have used the SSi Welsh Challenges which come to less than 40 hours of material (though of course with listening exercises, time to think things over, watching S4C etc as well) and I’m impressed with the range of things I can say and understand.
Even though (might be my imagination) the app doesn’t seem to move through material quite so quickly, I would still think the intensive has the potential to take you beyond a similar level of Japanese.
By default the app definitely goes through stuff slower, which is on purpose as the old lessons were just too fast for most people. You can make it faster by skipping a few times, but I recommend spacing them out to whenever things feel a bit too easy! You’ll have skipped over some introduction items but as a Zen SSi veteran you might be able to handle it But we expect we’ll still be past L3-like content by the end of the intensive 
I’m thinking that since I’ll be awake for a bit more than 10 hours each day, I’ll try to fill the rest of the day with a bunch of Japanese listening…
As for intensive plans in general, we’ll make a thread here on the forum and try to check in regularly (I’ll do it, and I’ll try to remind Aran and Tom to do it too). I’ll also see if we can set up some times for streams and chats ahead of time as well, so you can plan your days out as well
That’s cool. While when I first started I repeated a challenge or the second half of a challenge in order to be “perfect” before moving on, by the end I was fully convinced the method worked so I did each challenge only once.
Somewhere in the first 50 mins of app use I thought I heard the audio speed up slightly… and I was relieved. My trouble is I like to do whatever task I’m doing “properly” and so even though the app felt slow I was hesitant to skip and miss something important. But I suppose the world won’t end if I risk it.
Here’s the japanuary thread, for anyone interested:
Robo-Aran just asked me “how long does it take you to start feeling tired?” I feel like he’s taunting me… 
He’s taunting me as well, if that’s any consolation 
I have done a little Japanese on Duolingo, along with French and Welsh and am very interested in tackling Japanese on here. So it’s great news for me. Would love to have more details of when and how, and price etc.
I’ve been a member of SSi W for many years doing Welsh and have looked into the Forum several times but dont really know how to use it re posting messages, replies, etc. Can anyone give me advice on this please?
Hey there! All new langauges are included in any SSi subscription, so if you still have access to Welsh, then you also have access to Japanese They’re all available in the new app.
If you’re not in a rush, I’d wait until after we’ve finished our intensive - currently while it definitely works, it requires a lot of faith that things will work in the end and we have a lot of easy fixes we can do almost straight away once we’re out