Same me, if I had known about Pimsleur before I came here and completed the course before even arriving, I would have been flying ahead.
To Synwave, give the Chinese (Mandarin) one a go. After all, this is ofcourse a form of the Chinese writing system that we are all learning here. Although the Japanese forms and the simplified Chinese forms are quite different. They are simplified in the sense that they are quicker to write, so each kanji has fewer strokes. This can make it more difficult though. But the little amount that i've looked into has interested me a great deal.

Excellent point synewave. "The Answer" is definitely needed for Japanese. I've revised my study path after considering that.

What he means by "the answer" is the correct answer that the Pimsleur course expects you to say if you followed that from the start. For example the person may say " How do you say No Thankyou in japanese?" So your natural response may be "ii desu" but the course expects you to say "kekko desu" etc. If you start a Pimsleur course halfway then I imagine this kind of problem would appear all the time.

kyotokanji Wrote:What he means by "the answer" is the correct answer that the Pimsleur course expects you to say if you followed that from the start. For example the person may say " How do you say No Thankyou in japanese?" So your natural response may be "ii desu" but the course expects you to say "kekko desu" etc. If you start a Pimsleur course halfway then I imagine this kind of problem would appear all the time.

That's what I was getting at. Pimsleur does seem really good, but if you already know a bit of the target language, that knowledge hinders your use of Pimsleur.

Gotcha. I often intentionally do that with Pimsleur.

I was taking what you said as "The Common Expected Polite Answer" in Japanese. I forget what it was like to not know anything. I doubt many students would be satisfied jumping right into months of Heisig without at least having something to navigate basic conversations with. That's why I added Pimsleur to the foundation. It really seems to be the best way to jumpstart someone into speaking and hearing Japanese. They can then build from that.

Well, i think my japanese will receive a nice turbo-lift.
I'll be going to one of my cousin's place where they don't
speak any English and i think most of the town there doesn't
have many americans at all. More country-side. This will be
3 months too so i think that is the best thing that you can possibly
do to learn Japanese.

I haven't done any Japanese study aside from Remembering the Kanji, and the Pimsleur course so far has been fairly interesting: I must have confused it with another audio course earlier.

So, yeah, thanks for getting me set on that.