Mina-san, we hope that everyone had/is having a great Saturday! Tokyo was deserted, as there seems to be many people on vacation! Hope everyone has a great weekend.
Yoroshiku onegai shimasu.

おはいよ。It was also a beautiful morning here in Cardiff. To the Japanesepod101.com team, enjoy your Golden week holiday!

Enjoy your week! I wish we had Golden Week in New York! Maybe I can pull some strings…

In college in the US, Golden Week is better known as Spring Break.

Orlina-san, thanks for the update! Hope you had a good night sleep.

Naz-san, thank you too for the update. We can only imagine how nice it is! We’d love to see a picture. As for our holiday…… Golden Week 2007 should be great.

Bob1-san, thanks as always! Same to you. As for labor laws…..that is a sensitive issue around here. Your post put a scare into the working listeners and the cheap foreign (American and Scandinvian) labor at the office. We’d like to inform you that you are the winner of our JapanesePod101.com Golden Week vacation package! Wed-Sun, all you can work, all you can type, and all you can write. See you Wed!

Jake-san, please make it happen! And let us know how it goes.

Horacio-san, wow!! Now that is great! If I knew that, I would have asked to do an exchange program in Mexico every May! As April in the Golden Month in the US, it would have been great to follow it with a Golden Month in beautiful Mexico! Wow, wish I had known that when I was younger. What does everyone do?? Here they are all traveling!!! Tokyo is quite empty, well by Tokyo standards, as many people went back home.

Jason-san, yes, spring break!! But once a person graduates… It is just a figment of the imagination. Jake-san, how are we doing on the petition??

Tohru-san, thanks for the post! Definately check out del.icio.us/japanesepod101. Nipponblog was one of the first links in there. Also, we have almost every to-date that has been listed on the site. It’s a pretty good collection. Over the past month we’ve been busy, so it may need some updating. If we’re missing anything please let us know. Keep the posts coming. And let us know if you find a site in there you like.

Here in Sweden we also have sort of a holiday today (sunday) when we welcomes the spring or something like that. Tomorrow (monday) we have a day off because of all the political partys which are going to demonstrate in the cities. An unnecessary holiday because we lost one holiday because they didn’t want to take this away. Anyway, enjoy your holiday and keep up the good work.

Matane

David-san, thanks for the post! Yes, David Hallgren has taste!

JockZon-san, thanks for the info. I’ll ask David Hallgren about this as he is also from Sweden. They have a similiar day here regarding spring. Hope you’re enjoying your weekend.

Merkel-san, njuku.com was mentioned multiple times in the comments here and, along with another 228 links related to Japanese learning, can now also be found at del.icio.us/japanesepod101. All standard beginner lessons are in polite (not colloquial) standard Japanese. Intermediate lessons do incorporate both.

I wish I had a golden week right now… working the weekend is no fun. So busy this week that I fell behind again!

At least I’ll be on vacation in a couple weeks, and visiting Tokyo at the end of the month!

I hope the JPod team has a great golden week!! You all deserve it.

Sorry! The grin messed up the URL

Here is the correct URL:

http://www.brovision.com/

Merkel-san,
I tried your link: http://www.brovision.com/
but it was completely useless to me, since I am a beginner. I can understand romaji, can read all the kana and a few kanji.

Here’s a link that’s quite useful, The Kanji Site:

http://www.kanjisite.com/

By the way, where are the “Links” on the new web site?:???:

Liz-san ¡great page! Very nice videos and pictures!

Here in Argentina is a very nice weekend to and tomorrow is the “day of the worker” here, a three days weekend is very good to get some rest.

I wish a good vacation to all the people of in JP!

“I wish I had a golden week right now… working the weekend is no fun. So busy this week that I fell behind again!” I understand you perfect! But, my vacations are in July

To P. Merkel,

The sites you gave - at least those where the link worked - are very advanced. This site is doing a great job of covering the basics, without which the advanced sites are totally useless. I have been to Japan for business, and I have studied in Japan. In both cases what I need is more information on how to get a meal or a room, not how to disucss Fourier Transforms or the legal regime of Japan in the 1300s. Everyone has to start somewhere and this site is a great place to do it. If you find it too simple, why bother posting here? I find the other sites too complex, but I don’t think that entitles me to criticize them.

Keep up the good work, guys!

Fourier transformations rock!! that from a phycisist, but I would prefer to get a propper meal in my trip to japan that to discuss about n-manifolds with a waiter. I find that JP101 makes an excellent combo of entertainment and teaching, and I do appreciate that.

Learning languages lends naturally to an entertainment approach, and me, for one, enjoy thoroughly the JP101 experience.

Science is quite important for me, but getting across with the basics is a most. And that I get from JP101. I am going nowhere else for my nihon go learning for the moment. Other sites are great if you have more than the basics covered. I am sorry to say that I am merely a begginer, and as such, this site is just what I needed.

Merkel -san,

Thank you for your link. The site looks very good. I am going to try it out ASAP.

I am half Japanese and have lived outside Japan all of my life (however I do visit my Japanese relations!). What you get on Japanese pod 101 is, in my opinion, really good. It is useful. It is to the point. And it is what you hear in Japan - - as the presenters stress again and again context is very important, so you have to be very, very aware of the context these lessons, just as you have to be very, very aware of every interactive situation in Japan … So, as a half Japanese, non-native speaker with real problems when it comes to reading and writing Japanese, not to mention just understanding what half my family say! - I thoroughly recommend listening to Japanese pod 101: it’s alive the way alot of classrooms, real and virtual, are not.

When I want to learn something I prefer a University room rather than having a drink with my teacher. When I want fun it is the other way round. If you expect or look for teacher-entertainers, I think that teachers-teachers (and entertainers-entertainers, that´s to say, people who respect and is loyal to their own field of expertise) are the best. A good teacher is entertaining too because fun is part of the teaching process and entertainment is never an ingredient added or combined with the teacher to make a “combo” (please, let´s leave making cocktails to the bartenders). Besides, Japanese language is so appealing and wonderful by itself that I feel there is no need to spend time and effort to give any extra.

Those of you working in a company with time to learn only a few pieces of information every day, people who only want a meal and a room in Japan, voracious students without appetite (the true ones never feel close to egomaniacs or aren´t afraid to be taken by one of them, they feel proud to be like that and don´t take precautions when the say it), newcomers (I can´t imagine a more lively and rewarding Japanese learning than doing it by speaking and writing to my family but I suppose Tohru will have his own reasons to do it that way), manga fans, kids… Japanesepod101 is for all you whithout any doubt and I never said the opposite. I spoke in yesterday´s post about a desirable wider range of topics covered in the lessons and a more eclectic approach to teach Japanese but listeners preferred to call my comments “studying 1300´s Japanese legal system” or “discussing n-manifolds with a waiter”. On the other hand, I never showed any doubt about japanesepod101 credentials to teach japanese, never said that it is not to the point within the narrow limits the staff chose to move, never said that it is not useful to learn conversational Japanese plus some hundreds kanji… but people felt anyway that they had to remember all this to me. What all this means is too clear to spend time commenting on it. Facts like that (and many others) sets the tone of what´s discussed in this section and shows its real (and very low) value as a forum of discussion on what´s done in japanesepod101.

I think podcasts are a great way to teach languages but japanesepod101 doesn´t make use of all the potential advantages it has. The humor, entertainment and liveliness that Peter tries to show in every lesson (very good though occasionally it is overdone) sets at the same time the limits of the podcast because the pressure he puts on himself to be fun and entertaining will make hard for him to take on issues that are taken on in other webs or books that teach languages. This web, for instance, says in its “About us” section that “…Lessons are carefully crafted to include current events, words, celebrities, and so-on. For example, when the Japanese baseball team made it to the finals of the World Baseball Classic, we were able to do a lesson about this on the very same day. Before the Olympics we had a lesson introducing the big name Japanese stars. And of course, we’ll be doing the same for the upcoming World Cup in Germany…” and, leaving aside the English grammar mistakes, when you give three examples of current events and the three of them are about sports it is very clear what you understand by “current events”. One can be lucky if the evolution of Nikkei, the latest scientific breakthroughs or the political situation of Japan are mentioned once per year (how may the businessman listener call my three examples? Yeah… I remember now… “…to disucss Fourier Transforms…” (I copied and pasted) and things like that) Culture classes are so few and far between that, in fact, one can´t complaint too much about this. That paragraph doesn´t mention the fact that only advanced Japanese students can find useful to know the kanjis or pronunciation of Japanese Olympics stars names (and we already know that this is not for advanced students), in that particular lesson about the Olympics, no Japanese language item was explained (at least I don´t remember it), no vocabulary related to Olympics was taught systematically (only a bunch of words), and on and on. How can you say that “Lessons are carefully crafted…” when there is no Japanese lesson.

Does this mean that I think Japanesepod is doing it wrong? Not at all. It is enough to see the posts in the forum (Food and Entertainment 45, History and Tradition 6, General culture, 0) to realize that what Peter is trying to do is totally right. I just mean that Japanesepod101 may work in the future perfectly well as a business by teaching basic Japanese or being the very good survival audio phrasebook for tourists that is now (it has already everything to be successful. Its faithful listeners remember it in every post and I agree with them on this) but it could be much more than that and so far they have hardly showed a true desire to become it. This web could be an excelent platform for people who wants to live Japan (and also live in Japan) and not only survive in it. The pompously called “2.0 version” of this web was a missed opportunity to do it. They failed and I regret it because I truly believe in this idea and, above all, in the people working on it.
Take care all of you
See you again on Japanesepod101 8.0

Just got back from Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Because of Golden Week, I had to book everything way in advance. My hotel was packed with no vacancies. Lots of Golden Week “specials.” But for my Japanese friends, Golden Week is no big deal. They’re not going anywhere.

The weather is really starting to get warmer now:)

Wayne

Laura-san, please let us know how it goes!

Wayne-san, more details about the trip!! Wow, sounds great.

Stanely-san, thanks for the post and for listening! Kongo mo yoroshiku onegai shimasu.

Merkel-san, thanks for taking to time to write such a long post.

Tohru-san, thanks for the post. Let us know if there is anything we can do for you.