Miku Real Japanese shadowing audio masterclass review

As the title indicates, I’ve bought the Miku Real Japanese shadowing audio masterclass and want to give a thorough review. I decided to do that because, when I wondered if I should buy it or not a year ago, I was unable to find any in-depth review. I thought I should write one so that future learners might use it to make a good decision for themselves. Disclaimer: I am not totally done with the audio, but have done more than 50% of its content so far. Maybe I’ll come back to edit some details when I’ll be totally done with it, but I think that at this point, everything should be similar structure-wise until the end of the course.

Also, if my writing seems a bit off to you, it is probably because I am not a native English speaker, but rather a French native speaker from Québec, Canada. If anything is unclear, please comment and I’ll do my best to fix it. Alright, here we go.

To give a little bit of context, I am currently living in Japan, working as an ALT (yes, I’m not a native speaker, but since the English level in Japan is abysmal, they figured even I could help the students get better at English) nearby Osaka. When I came here, I was barely N5 level. It was a huge shock at how helpless I was at Japanese, and decided I would turn things around. I started studying with many different resources, using [Renshuu.org](https://Renshuu.org), Meguro Language Center, the Genki textbooks, and getting exposed to Japanese by reading NHK Simple News. All those resources were lacking one crucial aspect: Speaking.

In the workplace, colleagues who don’t speak English will avoid talking to me at all cost, except the usual すみません and おはようございます. Those who are able to speak English will not practice Japanese with me, not because they are mean, but because they are usually incredibly busy and need to pass information quickly and accurately. When interacting with the students, my role as an ALT is to make them practice English, so I don’t practice my Japanese with them all that much. Overall, my workplace is not somewhere I can practice my Japanese speaking skills efficiently. I had some time to go out in the city and meet Japanese people, but most Japanese people who speak to foreigners do so because they want to practice their English. \****sigh\****

That’s how I decided to pick up Miku Real Japanese shadowing audio masterclass. Overall, this is a good masterclass with a major problem. I’ll divide this review into three parts: Good points, small bad points and the big bad point.

**The Good Points**

* Miku is an enthusiastic person, and it makes the audio that much more enjoyable.
* The content is really useful to learn casual and authentic Japanese. As someone living in the Kansai area, these audios have helped me a lot because she does explain a few crucial 関西弁 expressions.
* The way the masterclass is built is wonderful. You have one long grammar audio (about 30 to 45 minutes long) that you listen to once, and then have a Japanese-only audio to shadow 15 sentences explained in the grammar audio. I usually listen to the grammar audio on the weekend, and practice the Japanese-only audio while going to and coming back from work all week long, for a total of 10 repetitions.
* She uses varied vocabulary and comes back to it often. It allows to progressively learn new words here and there that I manage to use in my daily conversations.
* She is a suspected mind-reader. Whenever I listen to the grammar audio, a lot of questions pop up in my mind, and she has a gift to answer most of these questions right away.
* Her English is very good. While not perfect (I could say the same for me), she really does have a good understanding of the English language, that allows her to accurately point out similarities between the two languages, but also to know when those similarities stop.
* She also includes some natural conversations that allow you to practice your listening skills, and more specifically the grammar point that is the focus of the lesson. That is a really big plus.

**The small bad points**

* There are a few explanations that are lacking. Particles used in the sentences are seldom explained, and they sometimes change even though they are used in similar sentence patterns, with no explanation given. That can be a bit frustrating, but since they are not part of the grammar point itself, I give it a pass. It should be noted that if a particle is part of the grammar point, she **will** explain their usage in details.
* The app used is unfit for a shadowing audio. The app cannot be controlled with earphones commands (like pausing it by tapping my bluetooth earphone, as you can do on apps like Spotify). The rewind button does 15 seconds skips, which are around 1 and a half shadowing audio exercise. It is inconvenient when you miss a particle or something and want to go back.
* The worst offense of all with this app is that if you go out of the app while it is paused, it will rewind somewhere between 5s and 15 minutes. I’m not talking about closing the app; if I press pause and open the internet to look up a Japanese word online, when I’ll come back to the app, I won’t be at the same timestamp anymore. You have to memorize where you were before leaving it, or otherwise you have to go around by using those large 15s skips.
* The rhythm is not constant. The shadowing audio is always built the same way: Miku says a sentence twice so you know what you will have to shadow, then she tells you to repeat after her, and then she says the same sentence twice again, and that’s the part you actually shadow. What annoys me is that the duration of the pauses varies, ever so slightly. Sometimes it’s 1,5s, sometimes it’s 0,2s. It throws you off and you never know when to start talking to be synced with her. Most of the sentences are fine, but I would say that a good 20% have an off-putting timing to them, making it uselessly difficult to be synced. This would have been easily avoided in the editing process.
* There are also minor mistakes in the recordings. Once, the shadowing part was actually absent for one sentence. In another audio, the sentences practiced in the grammar audio were different from those in the shadowing audio. Those are very minors and incredibly rare occurrences though.

I acknowledge that all those are rather minimal inconveniences. The good product I described could totally be worth those, and I would think so too, if not for the major caveat I’ll describe next.

**The big bad point**

For the first few months I used that app, except for the minor things I just described, everything was smooth sailing. But after approximately 6 months, Miku started talking really fast in the shadowing parts. I don’t know why she did that. I thought maybe it was only one audio or something like that, but now it’s been 4 months, so 16 audios in a row, where somewhere between 1 and 10 sentences are just impossible for me to shadow. It is simply a diarrhea of sounds coming out of my mouth, that not a single Japanese person could ever understand, and I am still not fast enough to shadow her.

We are talking about sentences that are somewhat long, which can be difficult to pronounce for many different reasons, that Miku says without taking pauses while sometimes talking at a near-native speed. For example ” ネイティブの日本語が聞き取れるように今日からポッドキャスト聞く”. You don’t have the script in front of you, and the pause between the two repetitions is less than half a second. If you trip anywhere during that sentence (and I did every single time I tried to say that specific sentence while matching her speed), your exercise is pretty much thrown out the window. Since the app is working terribly, I never pause or go back, especially since I’m actually walking home while holding my things when I do these audios.

I just don’t understand the aim of talking at that speed. Some 1-word sentences will be said incredibly slowly, and the longer the sentence is, the faster she talks. It’s as if she had a rule she had set on herself that every sentence must be exactly 3 seconds long, so she will adjust her speed to have a somewhat constant length. The goal of the shadowing audio is to practice saying things with a natural intonation, and getting used to repeating the patterns so they come more easily to your mind when having conversations. Talking fast just adds an obstacle for no good reason in my opinion. Most of these rapid sentences, I butcher them every single time, making mistakes with my particles or my verb conjugations, because it’s so fast that I cannot understand what she is saying while I’m talking since we are not synced up. It even got to a point that I practiced a grammar point wrong the whole week without realizing it, memorized it that way, and was told by a native speaker a few weeks later.

Those sentences have led to me being really frustrated, trying over and over to repeat and being unable to do so. I would sometime be able to repeat correctly once or twice at the end of the week, but I usually have to sit down and manually press pause and just repeat at my own pace, thus throwing away the actual shadowing part. With all the aforementioned bugs in the app, it means that a 5 minutes audio can turn into a 10, 15 or 20 minutes audio, depending on the difficulty of the sentences and the randomness of the bugs.

It is incredibly unfortunate that such good materials is affected negatively by something so easily avoidable. I find it even more ironic since Miku sometimes complains (understandably so) that native English speakers often speak too fast for her to comprehend.

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**Overall rating: 6/10**

If she had simply slowed down her speed, and made some 6 or 7 minutes audio instead of 5 minutes every single time, she would have a wonderful masterclass. I would have given it 9/10 instead, and the lost point is only because of the poor quality of the app used and the few mishaps here and there.

Maybe I am complaining too much, or maybe my pronunciation is just bad and people at my level should be able to do better. I still think it is a useless obstacle for Japanese learners. The grammar audios do all the heavy-lifting of this masterclass.

I still think it is a wonderful product in many aspects, but given the price of the product (249$ for the whole package or 15$ a month), I can’t recommend the whole package to anyone without feeling they are getting ripped off, since the main point of the masterclass is actually one of the worst aspect of it. Maybe try it for a month, go try a couple exercices around month 6 or 7, and see if you can match the speed. If so, GO FOR IT! It will be a really good product! But I feel that most likely, someone who still needs to learn the past tense of verbs in Japanese will not have the pronunciation skills to match her.

I will complete it since I paid for the whole package, but reluctantly so. I still think I am getting a lot of value out of the grammar audios. It’s just sad that the main thing I wanted to practice is actually the thing I dread the most whenever I start a new lesson.