This video is a long time coming.

Over all of these long years,

so many of you have asked me to give my personal review of Rosetta Stone.

I speak Japanese, and in the video where I explained why, I mentioned that

I grew up down the street from the Rosetta Stone offices.

At high school during career fairs,

the one table that I was always really excited to go check out was the Rosetta Stone career fair table.

And I've always had my eye on it.

I mean honestly, Rosetta Loretta, Rosetta Stone.

How about Loretta Rocks? I've been juicing that joke for over two decades.

It's meant to be.

So today, we're going to do a review,

and of course, because I'm a maniac,

talk about five steps that helped me learn how to speak Japanese.

So, let me grab my phone.

So, this video is actually in collaboration with Rosetta Stone

because you may have noticed I'm not holding any big yellow box with CD ROMs inside.

They actually have a new app, and they asked me to test it out,

and share my honest review with you guys.

You probably know the name of Rosetta Stone,

but from what I checked looking at the service already—

If you're like me and you've been trained in text books,

you're going to notice that this is a little bit different.

Rosetta Stone is a software, and now an app as well, that focuses on

language immersion through images and sound.

That means there's no English.

You're supposed to basically work through the language and get used to it more organically that way.

So when you first open it, you notice that there are a couple kind of core lessons.

Language basics, greetings and introductions, work and school, shopping, friends and social life.

Let's say we're starting from day one.

Core lesson

"Hello" x2

"Post office"

"Post office"

It immediately asks you to start speaking.

"The cafe is on his right."

"The theater is on his right."

The thing about Rosetta Stone Lifetime is that not only do you have the target language that you purchased,

but you also have access to every other language in the program.

Look at that. Merhaba.

Can the app actually handle writing and reading in different scripts that are not just romanization?

So I first came here and turned this on,

and what that did was within the lessons

it actually started putting in hiragana in between the actual image and sound cards.

For "inu" (dog) there would be an image of an inu, and then い would show up

so you know what character it is.

You can also go into the script section.

You can change it down to hiragana and katakana,

or if you're not trying to learn how to read and write at this exact moment in time,

and you just want to learn the sounds, you can still use just romaji.

I also peeked at the Mandarin Chinese as well,

and I saw that you could toggle in between—

you could choose between simplified or traditional Chinese as well.

There's a section called audio companion.

You can basically download the lessons beforehand and keep practicing.

You can do that on the go.

There are stories that go along with every single unit.

"Okinawan Fish"

"Okinawan Fish"

"Ryouji works at a post office in Okinawa."

It's already judging my pronunciation.

No~

It checks your pronunciations, and you'll get this little green circle if it was okay.

By the very end of the lessons, if you work your way all the way through,

you're looking at a lower- to medium-intermediate level.

I think this is a good starting point if you are a beginner

or a lower-intermediate, and you're still getting used to the language,

but you want to learn to actually force yourself to speak, and to have your pronunciation checked.

But I think if you're trying to actually learn to read and write,

that's something that you're going to have to do outside of the app.

I think there are basically two types of people who could benefit from this app.

The first type is people who really want to travel. If you're anyone like me, for example,

and you want to travel and go to a bunch of different countries,

the Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, etc.

When I travel to places, I want to be to speak a little bit of the language,

and I want to be able to pick up what I'm hearing.

That's part of the fun of traveling for me.

But I don't necessarily want to learn how to read and write textbook college level.

If you are an advanced tourist who likes to travel and be able to enjoy your time at the bar at the restaurant, etc,

using an app like this is something that could actually help you get speaking

and listening more quickly than if you sat down with a textbook.

That being said, on the other side,

if you're the type of person who's actually trying to learn

how to read and write and academically learn this language

so that you can go to school and/or get a job,

this is going to help you with your speaking and your listening,

but for the writing and the reading,

I think that's something you'd still have to supplement on the side.

I would recommend first learning kana, hiragana, and katakana

so that you can use this app without having to use romaji.

Working through the lessons would be a lot more fun,

and you would be ready to travel a lot more quickly

if you use an app that focused on speaking like Rosetta Stone.

I honestly wish if they added like a JLPT course,

or if they added in something like that,

I think that would be so cool because then you could actually focus on like the listening section.

Just my two cents from Loretta to Rosetta.

Personally, I'm actually excited about the lifetime app

because there are so many languages that are on this side of the globe.

You know, I went to Vietnam last year, and I bought a book,

and I learned nothing. I could say nothing.

If you want to be able to dabble in a lot of languages,

I'm basically going to be using this to scout out other languages in my free time.

So that is a review of the Rosetta Stone lifetime app.

If you guys want me to keep you updated on the other languages and other features,

feel free to ask me in a comment, and I'll let you know.

Thank you to Rosetta Stone for letting me review the Lifetime App.

Polyglots, travel enthusiasts, people who are interested in more than just one language,

and people who are more interested in speaking and listening,

I think you're going to have a lot of fun using an app like this.

If you're interested in trying this out for yourself,

I have a link for you guys underneath the description that'll get you a discount,

and if you're looking to try a lot of different languages,

the lifetime app where you can easily toggle between all of the languages,

they're all included for life. There's a discount for that as well in the description below.

Which other language do you think I'm gonna go for first? Leave me a comment.

So,

about this speaking thing.

So the first tip that really got me speaking in Japanese

and really kind of like getting rid of that accent was repetitive shadowing.

Recently, there are a lot of textbooks even that do shadowing.

"Takarakuji de atatta sou desu." --> "It seems I've won the lottery."

But with a textbook, you can't always pick who it is that you're shadowing.

It has to be someone that you look up to.

It has to be like an "akogare" (admiration) or someone that you actually want to sound exactly like.

For me, this started with anime, then I moved up to dramas,

but recently, I've been getting into a lot of Japanese YouTubers.

Like kemio. He's hilarious.

He's Japanese, and he lives in New York. So it's like really nostalgic.

It's like I get to see home in Japanese.

So there's that, but he speaks really fast.

I really like to listen to Watanabe Naomi.

She is so funny, and recently she's been doing a lot of live streams on her channel now.

Pick your favorite YouTuber. Listen at first while you're doing something.

So like for example, while you're doing your laundry,

and then after that, you want to sit down, focus and listen, and then get ready

to mimic.

The thing I really like about YouTubers is that they're repetitive.

They usually have an intro, a format, and an ending

that they repeat in every video. Unlike the JLPT listening section,

it's not like being hit by a truck like, you know what's coming.

If you just follow the same person, and use the same clip over and over and over again, you start to kind of

"minitsukeru" --> "learn"

To get it, you start to get it.

The next thing you want to do is when you're focusing is sit down, and

begin mimicking the actual audio sample that you pick.

I always kept an audio diary.

I originally started this because it was homework when I took Mandarin Chinese classes.

and then I started doing it for Japanese, and then I started doing YouTube.

I read this on an ad on a train somewhere

that was like you're the only person who can't see what the back of your haircut looks like.

And I was like, "Oh my gosh."

It's the same thing with YouTube. As soon as I started filming, I really started hearing my mistakes, and

hearing what my Japanese actually sounded like.

When you're actually sitting there listening to yourself,

you really start to pick up your mistakes, and you really start to fix them a lot faster.

I used to use the program called Audacity, but recently I just my phone.

Hearing yourself in the third person is what makes this key.

My audio diary usually was anywhere from one to three times a week.

I would do free speech for three minutes, listen to it,

make a list of all the words I wish I had known, then

imitate someone in a whole different clip on a different day,

and then the third day, I would try to use those words again in

a new audio sample, and then just repeat week after week,

week after week, week after week.

The next tip has to do with books. Here's what I mean.

Did you hear any speaking?

Like, I get so many comments asking how many kanji do I know,

how many kanji have I memorized. Like, you do realize that

studying kanji and memorizing words

has nothing to do with the muscle memory in your mouth.

It's like a sport, you know.

You can watch people play, or you can actually practice,

and if you don't practice, you can't get in the game.

What's more useful than just looking at it quietly

is to actually look at these and read them out loud into your audio diary.

Imagine that, huh.

Here's a Vietnamese book I bought that helped me not at all

because I sat there on the plane reading quietly.

My next tip is to immerse yourself at home as much as possible.

Some people like to label everything in their house.

Some people like to talk to themselves like a maniac.

Specifically, I found something that really helps is to change all of your software into Japanese.

When I first started working in Japan, I was given computers at work.

First of all, getting used to the keyboard is one thing,

getting used to the programs you think you know

in a different language was a whole other business.

You can only rely on so many hotkeys.

Just now for the video,

I used Rosetta Stone in English, but up until this video,

it had actually been in Japanese mode.

It's like now you can see those same screens are now all in Japanese.

Just like what the books, just seeing these words on the screen

or in the task bars wasn't enough for me.

I was still having a lot of trouble. One thing that helps me recently was to start taking online courses

for these programs in Japanese.

I recently took in Adobe Illustrator course in Japanese. The course was beginner level,

but the point was that I needed to learn the walkthrough

of the entire screen and the entire software in Japanese.

So now at work, instead of just being like

Again, you can do this with YouTube too,

with almost any of your hobbies,

whether it's design or code, tech, food, diet.

Explain what you're doing into recording.

This is something you actually have to do.

You have to put in the elbow grease for this type of stuff.

Just watch a beginner video in Japanese,

and start learning how to talk about it in Japanese,

and you can mimic it,

and put it in your audio diary, and shadow,

and you're gonna do great.

Quick note. The easiest way to find the correct

Japanese word for the proper noun that you're trying to learn—

If you go on Wikipedia,

not Google, Wikipedia

and search for that word, and then change the language settings to Japanese,

then you'll see the actual

word for that type of thing.

If you put photo manipulation into Google,

you're going to get a whole different word then if you actually

look up the word on something. For example,

like just changing the language setting on Wikipedia.

Copy and paste it into YouTube, and

find someone who talks about what you like,

and see how much more realistic your Japanese will get.

So tip number five.

You're probably wondering what my super hack is at this point.

The word for it is

"effort."

This is the elbow grease. This is the effort.

This is the old heave-ho that you've gotta give.

In other words, there is no super hack.

There is no shortcut.

Some people write ten kanji ten times a day, and that's how they learn to write.