What a lot of nonsensical criticism of Eric. His easy going, understated style
is excellent although obviously unappreciated by some.

The voice in the review track is Enis. エニスさんです。 He is doing RussianPod101 stuff, but also started doing the review track for JP101 lately.
よろしくおねがいします

However, I still love the lessons and get a lot from them. Naomi is brilliant and so was Rebekah when she was doing it. What happened to her?

And who’s the new voiceover in the Review files today? An Aussie?

First off, the shoe department clerk was obviously a man. Yet, for some reason Eric kept referring to him as a woman by using words like “she” or “her”. This made things kind of confusing and hard to know whether eric was referring to Laurie or the clerk. Since Naomi never bothered to correct Eric about this, it makes you wonder if either one of them even listened to the dialog before adding their explanations. Not very professional.

Then, Eric says that the expression お待ちください is not standard and is only used in stores and places like that. Ok, fine. But, in the very next sentence he starts talking about how common it is and how often you here which makes you wonder how he defines “non-standard”. Again, Naomi doesn’t pick up on this. She should know that the お+masu-stem+ください form is a polite form that is used alot in a variety of situations so it would seem to be pretty standard to me.

Also, the explanation of the difference between ください and お願いします was very 中途半端. On one hand, Eric says that they are different and that ください implies that the speaker is somehow lower in position than the listener. Yet, in the dialog the customer (Laurie) is the one using ください. This seems strange because I would guess that even in Japan the customer would be higher up that the staff.

Also, while Eric is saying these expressions are different, Naomi is giving examples (これをください and これをお願いします) that she says mean basically the same thing. Naomi also gives examples like コーヒーをください and メニューをください and Eric say you need ください because コーヒー and メニュー are tangible things. But, the very next example Naomi gives is アイスコーヒーをお願いします which confuses things because how is an ice coffee less tangible than just plain old coffee. Again, very confusing and it doesn’t seem like Naomi and Eric discussed this lesson in advance and worked out any possible wrinkles before they did the podcast.

Finally, I have to agree with Alan Smithee and Jenny. Eric’s jokes are kinda lame and really don’t add much to the podcasts. He’d be better off not trying to ad-lib so much and just stick to moderating Naomi’s explanations. Also, this podcast had nothing to do with pitch accents. I think what Alan Smithee is talking about is that Eric seems to go over the top a little bit when speaking in ENGLISH not Japanese. A little too emotive and dramatic which gets annoying. He’d be better off just “speaking” like a normal person instead of trying to “perform” as if he were on stage or something.