I have been on JP101 since day 1 - and the pace of the lessons has been incredible.

I like the idea of breaking down the site into different levels - working through say, 50 lessons and then testing yourself.

Check out yesjapan.com - i spend a number of months here and found the way they set out the different levels. You could also see what level each person was up to in the forusm section - and most people were around the same level which was encouraging!!

I def agree to a user survey. it would be a great way to asses where all the users are at. If you find out that 90% are still at beginnere level, then you won’t need to do as many advanced lessons. BUT - if most of us are intermediate - then you could justify 2 lessons a week.

BUT - I’d like the revision to happen. I’m actually going back aeach week and doing a couple of earlier lessons and working my way through them. Does anyone else find the questions really hard!?

This is one possible format that could work: You could release one new lesson a week at this level, which would be revision for the grammar points raised in 3 lessons at normal beginner level (i.e. week 1, lessons 1-3, week 2, lessons 4-6 etc). The new lesson could have one slightly longer dialog that incorporates the grammar points from the 3 equivalent lessons, and maybe adds a few new vocab words for good measure. You could then link the 3 equivalent lessons from the season 2 lesson, so that the new listener could do all 4 lessons (the 3 old ones and the new one).

This would keep the pace of 3 beginners lessons a week for the new beginners, but only take 1 day’s slot, allowing you to keep releasing new lessons for season 1 beginners and also intermediate.

Btw, I *LOVE* the site. This is my first post, as I only just caught up to the current level - I have spent the last few months playing catch up, so I can understand how a new learner would feel (overwhelmed). Please, keep it up - you have created a fantastic body of work, and a fantastic resource.

An emphasis on grammar would be helpful too, by incorporating the same constructions more often in subsequent casts and maybe even brief reminders of where theyre from.. sometimes i forget a certain vocabulary word or grammar point.. i like having it pounded into my head repeatedly. on the other hand i could review old casts, but doing that means i have less time to listen to current ones; catching up in a reasonable time frame means less time to absorb the material. i feel that in order to have a solid foundation in japanese, i need much more review. vocabulary isn’t so bad, there are dictionaries and the english translations in the audio to compensate for lack of retention.
but grammar is a different matter, much more difficult if i dont know the stem of a verb and forgot how the form in the audio was derived.

that brings me to particles. i think detailed instruction on particle usage would be absolutely fantastic. like in episode 126 with “mo” instead of “wo”. i was so happy with that explanation i almost cried. so beautiful. along with this, word order, where phrases, clauses, and so on should go. again, a lot of it was probably already covered, but i want to make sure you know that i know before the next lesson, so that were always on the same page: the first one
im only sort of kidding.

the “how would we say _ in japanese?” with peter explaining the role of each morpheme is wonderful.
a break down of each morpheme would be really, really helpful.

the slowest learner is the limiting factor in linear progression. so lessons should progress such that a slow learner with a reasonable amount of time to review each podcast (i.e. once or twice, are there very many ppl who listen to each lesson more?) would have no trouble keeping pace.

the thing that bothers me the most, though, is where is kazunori? he just vanished and no one mentioned him ever again
hope all is going well..

i hope that didnt sound too demanding. its a wonderful educational source. i cant say thanks enough.

The podcast is, after all, JP101, which implies a class for beginners, yes? Reading the posts I see that there are others like me who take the recreational path to learning- I realy enjoy the no-pressure learning, and the JP101 cast makes every lesson so much fun! I work every day, don’t have a lot of time to devote, hence, I am sooooo far behind! I for one am very pleased that you are aware of the lengthening gap between those dedicated listeners from the beginning who kept up and those like me.

My worry is that someone like myself may not go all the way back to lesson one should they come upon JP101 now or later. Can you imagine not knowing any Japanese and needing to catch up on nine months of back lessons??? So in the future, a potential new listener might just move on. You have to keep adding new listeners to be a continuing success I suppose.

I do sympathize with those who are on a higher level and want more intermediate episodes. I do not mean to be heartless to them! I enjoy listening and struggling with the intermediate lessons, trying to pick up a little, and I also listen to Miki’s audio blog, and get excited because I can pick out a few words

Anyway, I know I am rambling, but I do have at least a small contribution- perhaps when new listeners come on board they could answer a brief questionaire upon subscribing. Those already a part of the community could also do so. I would like one of those questions to not only be what level the listener is on now, but what level they began.

Oh, one other thing- one reason I am so far behind is that I realy enjoy the old comments! I listen to the new lessons but don’t realy study them because there is too much (vocab and grammer) missing. I study on the old lessons and in the comments I see new members tuning in for the first time, names I recognize now in the newer lesson comments, I see the progress they have made, I learn a little about them and feel like I also know them a little. I do not post because the lessons are so old, but this is actually my second post because I only recently got excited to see someone had posted to an old lesson comment six months later!

I notice someone asked about whatever happened to Kazunori- the original ‘Alpha Male’ - I wonder if Hatsumi ever returned? I loved her voice!

You are doing a great job guys (and gals)- Ganbatte kudasai!

As you know we’ve been using a linear approach with our beginner lessons. One of our goals in to clarify the difficulty of our levels and the level of each lesson. For example, our current beginner lessons are much more difficult than our first intermediate lesson. So a road map and level clarification are two major goals.

Season II lessons will be designed as stand alone lessons, while we will continue on in a linear fashion with our original progression plan. So those listeners who have listened to the first 126 Beginner shows, will be able to continue on with two lessons a week. While Season II will occupy at least 2 days a week. The linear progression course and season II lessons will be offered every other day to allow more time for review and practice in between. We would love to offer more high level material, but with our current staff this seems a bit too challenging. We’ll keep working to address this matter in the best way possible, while at the same time continuing to introduce new and innovative ways of learning Japanese.

Again, this is an open ended discussion, as we will continue to build JapanesePod101.com!

Yoroshiku onegai shimasu!

Recently, I started over at beginner lesson 1 (I’m up to lesson 40 now) and started listening to them for review purposes. My thinking is that by the time I catch up, I’ll be able to understand the current beginner lessons.

Intermediate lessons are out of reach for me now. I feel like I need to know about 80% of the content before I can handle the new stuff in a lesson. If I don’t, I get overwhelmed and distracted. Actually, in listening to the lessons over again, I’ve picked up a lot that I missed the first time through.

Having studied Japanese before finding JP101, most of the early lessons were actually a review already. However lately, most of the beginner vocabulary is new to me, while the grammar is still a review.

I would recommend slowing down and adding some review. How about a weekly review lesson? Or, occasionally focus on grammar or vocabulary instead of both.

Regardless, you guys are doing a great job and even if you don’t change a thing, I’ll still be listening.

You need to clean out all the non-relevant comments in the old lessons. The lessons may be ‘old’ to people that have been on JPod-101 from the beginning, however for someone just starting out they are new and vital and many of the comments are old and relevant to the lessons. Also, someone from the team will need to monitor these early lessons for new questions and comments. The early lessons need to be viewed as vital to students just joining JPod-101.

Ramping Up:
In three years ‘ramping up’ will not be possible for someone deciding to study Japanese from JPod-101 for ‘fun.’ The problem that really needs to be solved how not to ignore the new people and keep the feeling of community.

The Second Season:

It’s a good idea. For all of non-students [those of us working 8-14 hours a day] its hard to progress linear. I find some beginner lessons easy, some difficult, though not very difficult. To review past material is ‘good’.

Intermediate are always challenging; some I by-pass as to difficult at the moment with my limited time, and spend more time on the beginner lessons and the new blog by Miki.

The blog by Miki is great. Very challenging but worth the battle.

I satarded listening to Japanesepod101.com this last wednesday, I could’nt hold my self and I am already in Beginners lessons 21. I’m from Brazil, main laguage portuguese (really difficult comparing to english or japanese) I’m loving these classes you guys have. I’ve downloaded all lessons in my ipod and I’m listening 3 or 4 times each. I have my notebook to keep the “goi” and pratice Kana. I can say that you guys are great the ideia of season 2 is good as long as you guys don’t lose the speed that you have beeing teching for so long now. The manga cartoon from justin is awesome and the idea to pick some anime clips for the study is awesome too. I LOVE animes, here in Brazil we don’t have some good animes on Tv. But I keep my manga and animes from the past like Ranma, Naruto and of couse Musashi (the book). Weel I’ve spoken enough and lose my track so, “sore dake”.
Jane.

I think that a good format would be to create new lessons that tie together the key points from a couple of the first season lessons and review key vocabulary while introducing some new vocabulary.

I really like this idea, too. It would not only reinforce old stuff that for reinforcement really doesn’t need an entire lesson, and it also helps to teach combining constructions which is extremely important for being able to better express yourself.

Firstly, many, many thanks to the whole JPOD101 crew for all the enthusiasm and effort that you put in the lessons! I have been living in Japan for 2 years now, put lots of time in mastering the language, and find that JPOD101 has especially helped me - and continues to help me - in improving my listening skills.

I love the intermediate lessons, especially the recent story with Ryuta and Satoko, and have been eagerly awaiting each week’s new episode…being a little disappointed sometimes when the story was interrupted for a news message or something else.

But I listen to the basic lessons as well - sometimes they are a little easy for me but it is good repetition and often there will be new vocabulary or some other point I hadn’t heard before. The informal lessons are great - it’s one feature that I have not come across anywhere else, and living here, it can be really annoying sometimes when people speak to you in informal language (which happens more often than people make you believe) and you don’t catch what they say because you’re waiting for the ‘-masu’ forms as they teach you in school. (does that makes any sense?) If I have time, I even listen to the survival phrases sometimes - again, it’s good repetition.

As a general tip to people who are learning Japanese, one of the things that I have found in the past 2 years is that for me, it works best and I learn most by mixing several methods. For example, I have a grammar book for grammar, use Nihongo Journal (http://www.alc.co.jp/nj/) for reading exercise (by the way, that was a tip I got of this forum, thanks for that!), use an online kanji reviewing/drilling tool (http://www.japanese-kanji.com) for learning kanji’s, and for listening, I use JPOD101.

So, if you ask me what direction JPOD101 should take, my answer would be that I would like to see it continue what it is doing already. Supply conversations on different levels, and explain what happens in the conversation eg why it’s being said in the way it was said….

Ohh, and as a final note to - Miki: I really like your audio blog, keep it up! and to - Justin Silvestre: I think what you did with the Brothers Brothers conversation was amazing. Very beautifull! Maybe, you can turn the Ryuta and Satoko saga into anime someday?!

For new beginner visitors to Jpod, I think the original lessons are so fabulous and progressivly introduce the Japanese language such that it would not be a good use of valuable new beginner lessons to repeat this material. However, as Jean-Michel discussed, enabling and encouraging ’sub-communities’ for the original lessons is a great idea. Perhaps a combination of displaying only recent comments by default (while allowing the option to view older comments) and encouraging the Jpod team and established community to respond to new posts on the previous lessons would work.

Similar to Alan’s suggestion of a ‘10 most recent posts’ page, perhaps a page that allows viewing all new posts would be great. This page could could have user selectable settings to set how recent of posts to view as well as restrict the lessons searched by age and/or category.

For Season 2, I think that revision lessons would be a great idea. However, as mentioned above, I don’t think they should be a repeat of the first season with different dialogue. I think that a good format would be to create new lessons that tie together the key points from a couple of the first season lessons and review key vocabulary while introducing some new vocabulary. The PDF and learning center for these new review lessons could include links to the original lessons in which the reviewed grammar and vocabulary were originally covered.

I also want to say how much I enjoy listening to Jpod101’s podcasts. This is the only podcast I listen to and I even have my 10 year old son and my wife (native Japanese) listening and enjoying them. I had given up studying Japanese after my son was born (life became a bit hectic). With a planned visit to Japan this Christmas/New Years, your Podcast has provided the perfect vehicle to pickup where I left off and (mostly) re-learn what I’ve forgotten.

Your development of this podcast and website over the last 9 months has been phenomenal. I trust that whatever decisions you make moving forward will be the right ones and that we will remain as entertained, captivated and educated as we have to date.

Thank you.

Michael
Vancouver BC, Canada

If I have anything to say about it, the forum’s not going anywhere.

I realize it would be a tremendous amount of work, but an idea I’ve had rattling around my head for the last few days is to have a Japanese version of the Learning Center, if not the entire site, where everything but what absolutely has to be in English (like vocab and some explanations and such) would be in Japanese. It would be aimed more towards the intermediate-advanced learners who want as much immersion as possible.

Oh, and it’s cool to hear that people enjoy the English practice here too.

The main problem I had up to know is that I am lagging far behind the current lessons, which makes it difficult for me, as someone wrote before, to really participate in ongoing discussions and feel part of the “community” (this is actually my first post here).
When reading the comments to the daily lessons, I find it frustrating to see so many posts not really connected with the podcast itself but rather with the mood of the contributors on the day they posted their message. This generates a lot of “background noise” and I feel it would be preferable to have a section in the forum devoted to day to day communication among members, reserving the section attached to each lesson to real comments, questions, answers, etc.. that would then still be of interest to students reaching that point some time after.
Concerning season 2, I thing it is a good idea. Initially, I would have expected that at some point, the beginners eventually catch up with the Intermediate sequence of lessons. But of course, in that case, those like me who did not start at the very beginning will always find themselves studying old stuff and never be given a chance to stand at the cutting edge. Since there will always be new beginners joining, I think it will become necessary to build on existing lessons, improving them if required, but not necessarily replacing all of them. One way would be to simply introduce the option to display, as we can do now for “Beginner”, “Intermediate”, etc., something like “Beginner (current year)”, Beginner (year 2006), etc. Intermediate (current year), etc. Some lessons could be unchanged between different years, but others could be modified, or recreated from scratch. Of course, the discussion part for each lesson would be restarted each year.
This would lead to the existence of separate “sub-communities”, as there are different classes in any school, but everybody could take part in the general discussion on the forums.
These are just a couple of ideas but I think that, to establish some kind of “steady state” over the years (long live jpod101 !!), it will be necessary to introduce some connection between the different levels.
I am confident that you guys will find the best way to tackle this new challenge and make an even better Japanese podcast available to an ever growing number of people in the coming years.
Many thanks and congratulations once more.

Otherwise I enjoy getting used to the Japanese comments in the intermediate lessons. So I’d like to get to know these expression that you naturally use a bit more intimately.

For comments on the Advanced level see the forum on same subjects.

Jpod101 is a great formula and I look forward to more of the same.

Gambatte !

mikuji