Mina-san,

You know you do it too. What’s the best way to feign illness or to get out of work/school in general?

maxiewawaさん
{Futurama quote}
Folks, it’s worse than we thought. Seems dark matter is nature’s sex drug. It’s like a perverted trail mix of penguin oestrogen, penguin Viagra and Spanish penguin fly. Why, it’s making them ultra-fertile.

Well your garden variety penguin lays one egg a year. Since the spill our penguins have been laying six eggs every 15 minutes.

Also, the eggs hatch in only 12 hours.

Also, the males are laying eggs.

Before long the penguins will exhaust their food supply and starve to death.

I joined Penguins Unlimited to love penguins, not to hunt them.
This time the two are one and the same!

{/Futurama quote}

bjorn, you are THE MAN!
max, you too!

this lesson had a lot of extra material going on in the background!! wooo-hooo!

very good vocab and excellent grammar point

Neil-san,

I checked Wikipedia and found that かなwas named as “仮名” in responding to “真名(mana)” which kanji was called before, because kana was produced based on kanji.
I didn’t know that kanji was called “真名.”

Perhaps this point was raised previously but it seems to me that, in the “英語が入ります” section, the speech of each character had better be split into smaller chunks. I often listen to the podcasts while driving my car (I know I shouldn’t http://www.japanesepod101.com/wp-images/smilies/icon_redface.gif) and I find it hard to memorize several Japanese sentences containing new vocab till their translation is given. As a result I often need to “rewind” in order to hear them again, or eventually give up till I have a chance to check the pdf at home in the evening. This, in my opinion, defeats one of the major advantages of a podcast, which is the possibility of listening to it without a book at hand. Whereas I understand that the natural flow of the language should not be disrupted when the dialog is given at normal speed the first time, I see no advantage in making the translation part more difficult to understand.

I would be interested to know the opinion of other users.

Apart from that, I am still quite enthusiastic about the whole podcast. Congratulations for the outstanding job you are doing at JPod101.