Mina-san, can you try out either of these words in a sentence of your own?

Give it a shot!

I really, really like these lessons. –

Ericさん、great try! Please know you had the office and half the translation upstairs working on your sample sentence. Yuki did a great job of replying!

Yuki先生ありがとうございます！

A person, thanks! These lessons are really fun to do. Please keep the feedback coming.

Never mind what I just said.

These lessons are pretty useful; I’ve been adding one example sentence for each idiom in my Anki idiom deck for recognition practice (great for learning kanji readings).

My idiom dictionary has a bunch of 四字熟語, but also other idioms like those using 気, 頭, 口, etc, which seem to be more widely used, but harder to look up in a regular dictionary. Maybe these lessons could incorporate a variety of idioms at some point. Just a thought

YUKI先生ありがとうございます。

These are great, thanks! I decided to practice my listening and tuned into Odoroku TV and guess what word immediately jumped out at me? Kyoumishinshin!!

I’ve just found a software to practice 四字熟語 and other difficult kanji readings… it’s a mac-compatibled donation-ware called 漢字力. There’s also an iPhone version (both full version, which I think is about $4.99, and a “mini version” with only 1000 question which is free).

The program shows you a kanji-written word, and you have to give the proper reading. Aside from 四字熟語, you can also be quizzed on names, animals, etc…

It’s fun, but VERY high-level (so far I’m failing miserably at 99,9% of questions…)

プチクレアさん、

Where can one find a copy of 漢字力? I did some searching, but could only uncover the iPhone version.

Lexさん,

the website’s URL is macer.jp (no www., no co.jp)

and you will find 漢字力 under 学習.教育.

今、興味津々で北京オリンピックの体操の予選を見ています。日本チームは強い！頑張れ～日本！

these lessons are fantastic! i’ve always been interested in 四字熟語 because they are so similar to yet so different from chinese four letter proverbs which are called 成语(cheng yu)! i’ve been studying chinese since young and it is linguistically and culturally enriching to listen to all these lessons(: I have used one or two during japanese class and my teacher was pleasantly surprised i’ve even recommended this site to my year four classmates who take japanese

thanks peter and natsuko and the jpod101 team, you guys absolutely rock!

Yuzzo san> Thanks for listening and your comment! Keep your request/comments coming so we can better serve you!

ジャビンsan> そうですね　 　Peterさんはいつもおもしろいです　 　
興味＝Interest、　そうですね　

ゼンsan>私も、興味津々でオリンピックを見たいのですが、テレビがありません　
watashi mo kyomi shinshin de olympic wo mitai no desu ga, terebi ga arimasen.
(I want to watch the Olympics too but I don’t have a TV.)

キーシャsan> Great comment! 使い方が上手いですね！