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Have you dreamed of traveling to Japan? Or maybe you’ve been to Japan and now you can’t stop thinking about going back? Either way, you might want to put learning Japanese on your list of things to do. Then when you get to wander up Mount Fuji or dive into the culture in Kyoto, you’ll be able to communicate easily with Japanese people.
If you’re not sure how to learn Japanese, then you’ll love knowing that Rosetta Stone makes learning Japanese as easy as if you were a child learning from native-speaking parents! We teach using Dynamic Immersion, which helps you associate words and phrases with images, so you can start forming sentences quickly. Learning Japanese with the Rosetta Stone App is fun, easy, and fast!
Rosetta Stone’s Japanese language app
While some might like to sit at a desk to learn Japanese on our user-friendly website, others may prefer to use their mobile device. We tend to use our phones and tablets wherever we go, so the Rosetta Stone App is like having a helpful tutor in your pocket or backpack at all times.
Beginners will start learning the Japanese alphabet or writing systems before diving into basic Japanese words and phrases that are typically expressed with kanji (漢字). If you have some foundational understanding of Japanese character and words, you can skip ahead beyond the basics and dive into a variety of topics like food or family.
Here are some of the most helpful settings in the app that you can customize:
- Easy navigation
- Switch languages
- Speech settings for sensitivity and gender
- Targeted or accelerated learning
- Offline mode
The app is designed to help you learn Japanese (or any of our other 24 languages) in a way that’s comfortable for you. You can change the gender of the voice and how sensitive the microphone is for pronunciation. While reading, writing, and speaking activities are included in each course, you can tailor your learning to include additional instruction for speaking or pronunciation to accelerate how fast you learn Japanese with Rosetta Stone.
Users love how easy the app is to navigate and all the options to immersively learn Japanese in a more intuitive way than playing games with unrelated words and phrases. If you’ve purchased a Lifetime Subscription, you’ll have access to all 25 languages and can easily switch between them.
3 features to help you learn Japanese fast with Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone has unmatched experience with designing the most effective language learning programs that focus on teaching a new language through immersive techniques. When you learned your native language as a child, you associated what you saw with words your parents spoke. The tools and techniques in the Rosetta Stone App will give you confidence to know how to learn the Japanese language successfully.
While there is always some amount of memorization when you learn a new language, such as the stroke order for characters or Japanese verb conjugation, Rosetta Stone makes it more fun and engaging. Beyond the core curriculum lessons, you can jump into other activities that will accelerate your knowledge of this amazing language.
Live Lessons and On-Demand Videos
An essential part of learning a new language is getting to know the culture, too. That’s part of Rosetta Stone’s mission to help anyone learn a new language like Japanese. When you use the app, you can navigate to Live Lessons. Here you’ll find 25-minute videos created by our native-speaking tutors on a variety of everyday topics you might want to learn about.
These Live Lessons are the perfect way to accelerate your conversation skills and contextual understanding of certain topics and cultural experiences in Japanese. You can plan ahead to catch an upcoming video or watch a replay later. Here are a few popular videos you could watch:
- Building sentences
- Family at home
- How to sharpen Japanese knives
This is also a great way to hear some of those key vocabulary terms in context. You can hear them talk about things kome ( 米 ) (rice), kaimono ( 買い物 ) (shopping), or dentō ( 伝統 ) (traditions). The more you hear a native speaker discuss basic topics in conversation, the stronger your foundation of Japanese will be.
Japanese Stories
Learning a language through an app is definitely different from learning in a classroom where you can interact with other students and play activities together. But Rosetta Stone’s program includes a fun feature to help engage users in a different way. As part of the Extended Learning features, you can choose to listen to stories in Japanese that are written for the level of learning you’re currently at.
Each unit has a variety of short stories that you can read or have a native speaker read out loud. It’s the perfect way to hear accurate pronunciation and test your knowledge of sentence structure and vocabulary words in context. There’s also an option to activate the microphone so you can practice reading the story yourself!
Here are a few topics you might read or listen to:
- sobo no rajio ( 祖母 ) (grandmother’s radio)
- fuyu no hana (冬 の 花 ) (winter flowers)
- hajimari to owari ( 始まり と 終わり ) (the beginning and the end)
Audio Companion
The Audio Companion is a helpful feature that gives you access to all your Japanese lessons with an option to download them. It’s the easiest way to learn Japanese in the Rosetta Stone App without network or data connection interruptions. Whether you’re in the subway or on a mountain, you can access your next lesson to stay on top of your language learning goals.
Frequently asked questions about learning Japanese with Rosetta Stone’s app
No matter why you’re considering how to learn Japanese, you’ll want to feel confident that you choose a program that will help you learn easily and immersively. Here are some answers to frequently asked questions that can help you feel confident about tackling nihongo (Japanese).
Is it difficult to learn Japanese?
It depends. Some people discover that Japanese isn’t hard to learn since the sentence structures are a little less rigid than some other languages. However, you’ll need to learn the Japanese characters and writing systems known as hiragana ( 平仮名 ) and katakana ( 片仮名 ), but the pronunciation of each letter or set of letters is consistent no matter what word they’re put in.
How should a beginner start learning Japanese?
The most important step to learning Japanese on your own is to use a reputable program like Rosetta Stone where you’ll learn immersively and have access to native-speaking tutors (with certain subscription levels). You’ll learn basic greetings and words to form simple sentences at first. It’s also important to work on your pronunciation from the start, which is why our TruAccent speech recognition program is so helpful to help you perfect your accent quickly. You can also listen to movies in Japanese, get immersed in anime, and listen to Japanese music.
Is it possible to be fluent in Japanese in a year?
Yes, you could have a strong foundation in conversational Japanese within a year. This largely depends on your method of learning and how dedicated you are. Using a reputable language-learning program like Rosetta Stone will give you the best chance, but you’ll need to commit time every day to learning and immersing yourself in the Japanese language through media too.
When you consider how long it takes to learn Japanese, you’ll need to know that Japanese is considered a Category V language on the language difficulty rating. To gain solid proficiency in Japanese, it will take about 88 weeks, but getting basic conversations and writing systems down can take 3-6 months with dedicated effort.