Vocabulearn or Playsay

[leonl]

Playsay
Vocabulearn

Through conversations with Japanese speaking classmates it has become obvious that I need to work on my speaking and listening skills. What I mean is when people speak Japanese to me I recognize the words, but it takes me a few seconds, sometimes even minutes to break the sentence down into individual words and play them in my head a few times until I understand what's being said. If anyone has experience with either one of these audio courses your opinion would be most appreciated. Both look good and are reasonably priced for what I need. The only advantage for the Playsay course is that each word seems to have it's own track which would save me the trouble of having to break the words down into individual tracks. Also Vocabulearn has a slightly larger word count 7500 to Playsay's 6646. Thanks

[yukamina]

I've used Vocabulearn, and I think it's useless. It's a long list of random words completely out of context. I don't think it will help your listening or speaking.

Maybe the site iknow would help with listening since it has a ton of sentence examples. I maybe be wrong, but I think it teaches about 6000 words.

[Infidel]

vocabulearn is good for pronunciation practice. Any other use is suboptimal.

[katafei]

I'm using PlaySay vocab JLPT2.
It's good for listening to pronunciation, but this is also all vocab without context.
It's not too expensive and I think it's worth it, since I'm a firm believer in drilling words as well as all the fun stuff.

But even JLPT2 will incluce nonsense words as 'ありがとう' and other JLPT4 stuff like that. Every word has it's own track and takes about 2 seconds, I think. You have to organize the words into groups yourself.

This year I'm in repeat mode, so it's all a bit easier. I find listening to vocab a nice thing to do when my brain is too crowded for blogs etc.
It works even better if you can obtain a written version of the same vocab lists, which are available online on several sites.

[furrykef]

But even JLPT2 will incluce nonsense words as 'ありがとう' and other JLPT4 stuff like that.

That's JLPT4? I'd have thought that was JLPT10 or something.