Learning Japanese with Pimsleur

[Kangoo]

Has anyone here ever used Pimsleur to learn Japanese? I'd love to hear of anyone who has!

I've had "learning Japanese" on my bucket list for a few years now, and finally decided to get started. After checking out various reviews online to see which program was the most adapted in my case (given that I never know when I'll be able to put time in, I was looking for something that I could purchase in an attempt to learn at home by myself), many sources seemed to point to Pimsleur, and I ended up purchasing the latter.

I've only gone through the first lesson so far (the lessons are 30 min long, and I did this one twice) and really enjoyed, so I hope to be able to keep it up.

[Trellum]

I have never tried learning japanese with Pimsleur, but I've tried learning other languages with the Pimsleur courses and I must say they are wonderful if you are looking for a wast and efficient way to start speaking a language right away.  Sadly you learn no spelling of the words and phrases you are learning, but that's not a problem if you just want to learn how to speak the language fast.

[petrushka]

I haven't tried Pimsleur to learn Japanese either but I'm not sure Pimsleur is a good approach to learning this language. From my experience, Pimsleur is good in setting you up to learn certain languages because it helps your pronunciation a LOT in a fast and efficient manner and if you're a native English speaker, it helps you in learning European languages like Spanish and French because they have similar sentence construction and alphabet in writing so getting the pronunciation down goes a long way in understanding conversations with natives.

But because Japanese uses a different writing style and has a completely different sentence construction to boot, wouldn't just listening to the language make comprehension difficult? Japanese words are "spelled as pronounced" more often than not so comprehension has more to do with context and knowing what words sound similar to each other and how a kanji is read during appropriate scenarios. Is it 良い as in yoi or 良い as in ii? That kind of stuff, I suppose it what I want to say.

Again though I haven't tried the Pimsleur approach and they most likely know about how important the written part of learning a language like Japanese is, especially since it drops subject markers easily and relies heavily on context.

Good luck with learning the language! Hope you can give a review here so we can see how effective it was for you.