i want to learn japanese so i can navigate japan toy sites and yja and be able to at least, somewhat, understand what is going on. i heard from a friend about this rosetta stone stuff. does anyone know what it's about? i know it's some massively expensive hunk of software, but will it work to learn me gooder?

lol...I've heard good things about rosetta stone but I've never used it myself. I've thought about picking this up for japanese myself but my concern was that I think the program is more geared towards learning how to speak and understand the spoken language? Anybody know? Would it be helpful in learning to read some katakana/kanji/etc?

i tried using rosetta stone to learn mandarin chinese. let's just say i didn't learn jack shit and ended up taking a class at a junior college instead.

good to know. thanks.

I used Rosetta Stone to learn German, but I was taking German in college at the time, too. Rosetta Stone works by using word/picture association as opposed to memorization. It did help some, but I can't imagine it helping much without some additional instruction. Nothing like taking a language from someone fluent and being able to converse with them.