Bullet Japanese

Bullet Japanese is the creation of David McGimpsey, a British man living and working in Japan who was under pressure to learn Japanese as fast as possible in order to survive.

The following is my review of this product...

My first impression of Bullet Japanese was not good: I shouldn't have to watch a video tutorial to figure out simply how to open and run a lesson. However, the software is based on an interesting idea. If it could just be a little more intuitive, then we'd be getting somewhere. For some reason, none of the buttons in the user interface are really clear.

As a product, Bullet Japanese is useful in its own right but only as a testing tool for teachers. It would make a decent though not fantastic self-study product... and ONLY in conjunction with existing curriculum. It is, basically, just a testing program. So, it's essentially NOT a learning program, and NOT fast because you must study the Japanese phonetic alphabet to use this software. Learning written Japanese is (initially) equally difficult to learning spoken Japanese because of the intense memorization of over 100 characters.

Since most tourists visiting Japan would NOT need to bother with this huge hassle, the software is only viable for those living in Japan. A large enough audience, of which I'm part for sure. However, since it is only a testing tool, it can only really be used by Japanese teachers. I'm guessing that's what the publisher of Bullet Japanese intended, since a large amount of design attention was given to creating and importing customized lessons. Since this is a time-consuming and labour-intensive process, I don't see students of Japanese wanting to do this at all!

As of this writing, there's also a bug or two... for example, the tests frequently repeat questions as there is no algorithm to avoid repetition.

Bottom line... I can't really recommend this product unless it becomes more intuitive and undergoes a few more modifications to make it more competitive as an application. I mean, I really did have to watch a good 20 minutes of video tutorial in order to simply load and run a test... and no I'm not, actually, stupid!

On the other hand, I don't know as of yet what the publisher intends to do with this software. If it is intended solely as an aid for Japanese language teachers, then great, it works as that. And if they're intending on improving it and making it more user-friendly, then it will function well as a way for a teacher to create and run memory tests for students. Any other use, including self-study, is not really practical UNLESS you're running the tests downloaded from the website.