Before this one, I listened to The Complete Idiot's Guide to Japanese, and I decided to compare them.

If I can find an audio language program that is a combination of the two, that will be great. I definitely learned things from both programs, and they both have their strengths, but they have their weaknesses too — the most glaring of which was speed.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide went way too slow, with several seconds after the Japanese phrase before the English translation is given — so that I'd almost forgotten what they said — then only a quick second before the next Japanese is spoken so that it’s easy to mix up which phrase goes with which translation. Drive Time, on the other hand, went much too fast; there was never enough time between the Japanese phrase and the English translation, so if I had to pause and think, the recording would cut me off and move on before I was ready. The CD player in my car lags a lot when you turn it off and on, and there’s no pause button, so there was no good way for me to mitigate the speed issues. I was constantly rewinding, and that made it more difficult for me.

As far as content, I preferred Drive Time. Both programs focused a lot on cars, which was obviously kind of a gimmick (especially for Drive Time, as their program is set up around driving, with mile markers and everything), but also a bit silly as I don’t really think that vocabulary set is going to be the most useful for a new Japanese speaker. The Complete Idiot’s Guide takes the form of a little story about an American businessman traveling to Japan to meet with an old college friend, so that, too, was a very specific set of dialogues and vocabulary. Some aspects — like learning how to present your passport at customs, give directions to a cab driver, and check in at your hotel — are definitely useful, but to me felt like things I’d rather be learning immediately before taking an actual trip (which, to be fair, is probably why a lot of people decide to learn Japanese).

If you want any information about Japanese grammar and sentence structure, you’ll want Drive Time, not The Complete Idiot’s Guide, which doesn’t even broach the subject. The speed is an issue not just with how quickly they actually speak, but with the amount of new material that is introduced all at once. This program seems to assume that after hearing and saying a list of vocabulary words twice, the learner has immediately memorized them and is ready to use them in context. In lesson seven, for example, you’ll learn some words for talking about the weather; the days of the week; the special names for designating “the first day of the month,” “the second day of the month,” etc.; and both past and future tense. All of this information happens in only ten minutes, which is just an absurd pace for learning a brand new language. They recommend that you review each lesson before moving on to the next, but with how much I rewound and replayed, I must have listened to each lesson four or five times before moving on. Even then, I was far from having mastered it.

Basically, if you’re traveling to Japan on business, you can memorize The Complete Idiot’s Guide and be doing pretty well (until the actual meeting, anyway). If you’re more interested in being able to speak the language for its own sake, Drive Time gives you a better start. You’ll have to be either very quick or very patient, enough to repeat the lessons many times over.

I did learn a lot of Japanese, but it's not to a usable point yet. When I listen to the dialogues, I can only pick out words here and there until they slow down and break them into sections. I remember probably only half of the vocabulary words. I know how to construct many of the sentences they ask me to translate, but I can't always actually do it when they ask me to. I'm really good at repeating after them, and I think I have pronunciation down pretty well. Japanese is one of the hardest languages for an English speaker to learn, so I certainly didn't expect to be conversational after two beginner's audio programs (plus the Mango Languages app on my phone as a supplement). But The Complete Idiot's Guide seemed a little underwhelming, and with Drive Time I often felt left behind.