A couple of questions about the Romanization
  • Visioneer December 2014
    I just purchased the Platinum Edition of Living Language Japanese, and as I kicked off the lessons, I noticed a few things that popped out at me immediately.

    1.)  No clearly visible documentation of a 1 year limit of lesson accessibility:  This bothers me MOSTLY because I spent about 30 minutes looking for documentation relating to access periods or time limits.  This also bothers me a bit, simply because I am nostalgic for the days of buying a software, or language course, and having access to it as long as you could run the software.  Don't get me wrong, in today's subscription based online climate, I understand why it is done, I'd just like to see it specified a little clearer.

    2.)  The romanization of the Japanese kana are off a bit.  I believe it is for the sound, but I can't be sure.  An example is "Arigatou" ありがとう which is romanized through the lessons as "arigatoo," which if not read with phonetic context, could be interpreted as being pronounced "ah-ri-gah-too" (as in, the sound shared by to, and two) versus the more accurate "ah-ri-gah-toh."  Additionally, doesn't doing something like this do a disservice to those that use this program to study basic Japanese, that are also learning to read and write kana?

    I just think it would be helpful to introduce the "students" to the phonetic sound ladder exercise to be able to get a handle on pronunciation and identifying Hiragana and Katakana.  (The exercise of "ah ii u eh oh" and so forth) with the true romanization of the characters, rather than the voiced ones.
    Example:
    hiragana:  あ　い　う　え　お
    roman:      a    i    u   e   o
    sound:     ah  ee  oo  eh oh

    3.)  I'm really not wanting to sound like I'm complaining, I'm really enjoying the courses so far, I am just a bit curious why some of the choices were made to favor that direction.  I hope all you LL folks keep doing a great job.
  • Suzanne December 2014
    First of all, I'm glad to hear you're enjoying the course! We hope you continue to enjoy it and hope we can answer some of your questions. 

    The text indicating the online subscription is only a year long is located on the outside back of the package:

    "Access to online course, e-tutor, and community posting valid for one year after activation."

    We even made sure it was separated from the rest of the paragraph so it was more clear. We're sorry you missed it. 

    We do feel that a year is enough time for a learner to make it through this course. Also, once the subscription runs out, the learner still has access to the same vocabulary and instructional material through his or her books and CD audio. Finally, the app is unlimited, so the digital material is technically at your disposable in perpetuity if you have an iOS device. Our hope is that the learner will use the online course and e-Tutoring (which is probably the most valuable part of the year-long Platinum online learning experience, though it would be nearly impossible to promise e-Tutoring for eternity) for dedicated year long study, and then continue to use the book and CD audio to review and solidify the content. If you wish to continue your online study and e-Tutoring beyond that year subscription to supplement the book material, we have introduced scaled pricing so that you can continue for a month to a year, based on your continued need. 

    As for the question of Romanization, we wanted to use a widely accepted standardized system of Romanization, and so chose the traditional version of the Hepburn Romanization of Japanese to use in our course. The Hepburn Romanization system is based on English phonology, and so is meant to closely approximate the sounds for English speakers. The only tricky sounds to render in this system are the long vowels; for most (aa, ii, uu) it will be clear, but for ee and oo, it's tricky to the English speaking eye, and might be read as in the words "feet" or "boot"; if this proves to be too confusing to enough learners we will modify in the future. I understand your suggestion, but we wanted to use some sort of standardized romaji instead of a pronunciation key we made up ourselves, and so we went with the traditional Hepburn. We also hope that the student will rely primarily on the audio for pronunciation and move past using romaji to read fairly quickly, or at least quickly grasp the long vowel sounds and learn to recognize them in the text.

    I hope this helps explain some of our thought processes! If you have any further questions or suggestions for improvements to your experience, please do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected]
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