This review is going to talk about this course in the beginner course, as if they are one entity because in my opinion, there are two parts to the same course.
The method of instruction is very similar to what you would find with MTM courses, and I believe that Paul nobles, methodology is heavily inspired by it… And if I remember correctly, Paul Noble was a student of Michel Thomas at one point, and it shows. This is basically a refined version of that.
In terms of value, I would argue that Paul Nobles Japanese courses as good as its MGM counterpart for a fraction of the money, it covers just as much of the structure of the language, as it’s more expensive counterpart, all without the annoying third wheel present in the former’s methodology. And while I understand that the “not so good student“ was supposed to reduce tension during learning, I have found that it actually created some bad patterns when using the language by the time I finished… And I would have to go back and clean that up mentally. I don’t have that problem here.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the second half of the Paul Noble course was edited from a previous addition, because they introduce some vocabulary, midstream that they gave no formal introduction to, which left me mildly confused. It wasn’t much of a problem for me, though, since this was more of a grammar refresher than anything else. And in terms of what I needed it for, it did very well my only minor complaint would be that I wish they gave some time to teaching dictionary form verbs for Japanese… Since most of the time when you look up a word in a Japanese dictionary, or even a bilingual dictionary, that’s what you’re going to find.
And most of the time when people talk to you, you’ll find a mixture of the neutral, polite form, and the dictionary form being used, which kind of leaves the student at a disadvantage. It covers the most common structures you’ll find in the language, no, when comparing it to something like the Spanish or Italian courses, I don’t think there was quite as much structural coverage here… And I feel like that’s probably because of the linguistic distance between English and Japanese, and that they were doubling down on, needing to explain certain things in a more repetitive way. That being said, it was a pretty good experience, and for the money, you really can’t go wrong, using this to jumpstart your journey to learning Japanese.