Rapid Japanese

Volume 1

By: Earworms Learning

Narrated by: Marlon Lodge

Length: 1 hr and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

Rapid Japanese: The Musical Brain Trainer, a genuine breakthrough and your easy and effective access to the Japanese language.

Earworms MBT is a revolutionary accelerated learning technique that takes the hard work out of learning.

By listening to these specially composed melodies with their rhythmic repetitions of Japanese and English a few times, you pick up over 200 essential words and phrases that will not just be on the tip of your tongue, but will be burned deeply into your long-term memory in next to no time.

If you like music, and want to make rapid progress without any formal knowledge of language learning, Earworms MBT Rapid Japanese is the course for you.

Volume 1 is your survival kit of essential words and phrases to get you by on your trip abroad.

You will feel you are learning within minutes and might just be amazed by how easy acquiring a language can be!

©2006 earworms mbt (P)2006 earworms mbt

A True Breakthrough

WOW! Having just purchased and listened to Rapid Japanese several times during a beach vacation, I can report that this is truly a BREAKTHROUGH product!!! Here's why:

- The music and the entire approach makes it an effortless pleasure to work through the material. You'll actually ENJOY yourself while learning.

- The music and pacing puts your brain into hypnotic state where the words and phrases are effortlessly burned into your memory.

Music is only the tip of the iceberg:

- The pairing of an English learner and native Japanese speaker. The English learner (narrator) see's things from YOUR perspective asking questions and figuring things out on your behalf.

- Delicious repetition. Each new word and phrase is repeated over and over and over and over, often with subtle variations. I LOVE IT!

- Complex phrases are broken into their constituent parts. Starting from a complex phrase the English learner (narrator) queries his Japanese language buddy for the meanings of each part of the phrase and then rebuilds these parts back into the original combination. As a result things make sense and you're able to hear the parts and intuitively grasp the grammatical structure!

- The English learning (narrator) pronounces the Japanese phrases in way that is closer to the way a new English speaker would - this makes it easier to decipher the sounds. However this less than perfect pronounciation is always paired with a native speaker saying the same phrases perfectly. This combination allows you to hear the phonemes and then shift towards native pronounciation.

- The program introduces Japanese grammer and language constructs - but does so in a right brained immersive way.

I have used many, many language products and I can say without hesitation that Rapid Japanese Vol 1 is the best I've experienced.

My only complaint is that there is only 1 volume

PLEASE produce 20 more volumes just like this!!!

Random

I think it’s okay to use to try and learn but it felt very pimsleur just shortened by a lot and with music. Not very structured when it comes to how many times they repeat certain words.

Strange Pronunciation

The native speaker has an odd way of pronouncing phrases. Right off the bat, she pronounces the phrase "I would like a coffee" as "Kohe wa kudasai" My wife, who is Japanese, pronounces it, "Kohe o kudasai." Google Translate pronounces it the same way as my wife. So now I don't trust her pronunciation and I'm only 3 minutes into the audiobook.

Wow!

These are really neat!!!

Music tracks are really nifty and relaxed.

This has been very helpful. Honestly.

Great way to get comfortable with the language

Nice flow to the learning experience. Makes it easy for anyone driving or doing other things.

not what I expected

What didn’t you like about Marlon Lodge’s performance?

he added a lot of unnecessary conversation that added nothing ands voice just became annoying after a while.

Any additional comments?

Overall a great idea but the production value is pretty weak. First off, Earworms implies that there would be catchy tunes that I will get stuck in my head. This is not that. What you get instead is some nice ambient background music and a vocabulary lesson, with some echo effects thrown in randomly.
Although he Japanese speaker has a lovely voice I could listen to all day, the vocabulary and the music are completely unrelated. There is no attempt to match the rhythm, so if anything this is more of a subliminal learning program.
One of my biggest issues is with the section on numbers. Once again, music is just in the background, but instead of just following the same formula of English word followed by Japanese word, He decided to use some convoluted mnemonics. Many of which were at best idiotic and at worst wrong and potentially detrimental to learning the language.
Case in point. 7 is translated as nana. So he decides to rename Snow White, Nana. This is bad because not only does it not help to rename a well known character, but in Japanese her name is Yuki Hime. 9 was the only number that made sense and he just gave up on 10.
I already know how to count in Japanese but I would hate to be someone using this to start learning.

Bad Soundquality

Bad soundquality makes it very difficult to hear the exact pronounciation oft the japanese phrases. That's unfortunate because the recording is contentwise quite useful.

Great, for what it is.

Memorization to a catchy little tune. . .believe it or not, it works. The readers are very clear, and the available free pdf sheet is a great help.

Understand before you begin, that this is good for a very, very short trip to Japan. You'll be able to order in a restaurant, tell the taxi driver to take you to the airport, ask if you can pay by credit card, etc. They do get rather a lot into the hour long program.

Please remember though, (which, of course, I didn't) it's an hour long program. You will not be able to converse with native Japanese people beyond these very limited phrases. You will definitely not be able to turn off the subtitles on your favorite Japanese movies. You'll still be absolutely clueless when it comes to trying to read Japanese characters. I would love to see a language instruction course based on this rhythmic theory, but with some hint of sentence structure, grammar, etc.

Like Eavesdropping on a Language Lesson

Pleasant music and beat behind two soft-voiced speakers :one British and one Japanese. If you already know some basics this is nice to refresh your memory. The speakers repeat phrases and there are periodic sentence construction challenges. There are a few explanations of word order as well. I don't know if a total beginner would learn and retain the language.

Good for cramming before tourism

Earworms is easy to listen to anytime because you’re learning the words from repetition along to music so it sticks. And not boring if you’re doing something else and using it as a background, like at the gym. But the content is limited. My friend runs a language learning website for Thai and recommended earworms to me back when I was learning Chinese and it first came out.
It really does help you learn and remember, but like I said it’s limited. So you can ask about the airport or taxis, food, hotel check in etc. but you’re lost if you’re making new friends. Yes I have 1&2. In number two it helps you with basic stuff like who you are and “I like...” basically the two levels are like the first few chapters in a textbook.
Still worth it IMO. And will really help you out for traveling.
But for deeper language knowledge and fluency you’ll need more.

For me, earworms is a good sidekick to your travel phrasebooks and first time in a new country. It gives a good base and helps you get used to listening to your new language. (I’ve used both the Chinese and Japanese versions)
I do wish they’d extend the series.