When you listen to the podcasts from JapanesePod101.com, do you picture in your mind what the voice-actors look like? Do you ever wonder who creates the incredible Japanese lessons you have come to know and trust? Well, wonder no more! We have an amazingly talented team at JapanesePod101.com, and we are very excited to introduce them to you!
Meet the Team at JapanesePod101.com! A lot of work goes into bringing you our top-of-the line Japanese lessons, and we have a long list of brilliant people that work to give you the best in learning Japanese - audio editors, voice actors, hosts, content creators, proofreaders…and the list goes on! You can find out more about the wonderful people that bring you your favorite Japanese lessons by stopping by our Member Introduction page at the bottom of JapanesePod101.com. And don’t worry if you can’t find it…you can also use the link below to get there faster! So stop by, read up, and find out more about the people behind the scenes at JapanesePod101.com!
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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 6:30 pm and is filed under News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
21 Responses to “News #98 - Meet the Team and Find Out Who’s Behind the Scenes of all Our Great Japanese Lessons!”
Sunday at 6:30 pm
Meet the Team of incredibly talented individuals that bring you the Japanese lessons you love at JapanesePod101.com!
Sunday at 8:19 pm
Thanks for this! It was fun seeing the faces doing the voices I’m so used to listening to!
Monday at 12:46 am
Wow….I have been thinking about the exact things,
and finally I get to know the face of the voices I really like to listen to 
Thanks, you guys are great!!
Monday at 1:42 am
Minna san konnichiwa
What a good idea to propose us to meet the team !
It’s nice to see all of you and, cherry on the cake, in a good atmosphere
Thanks
Monday at 3:11 am
What a great ideia !!!
I ran through all the pictures. How fun that was !!! Hehehe. Funny pics of Peter-san and Sakura-san too.
I loved to recognize the faces behind the podcasts that I like so much ;D
One more time a great idea and great work of japanesepod101 team
Congratulations !!!
Monday at 3:23 am
Congratulatios Mr Galante,you have shown that through talent
and hard work , dreams really can come true.
Thank you for this opportunity to learn Japanese.
Monday at 3:59 am
お疲れ様でした! I’ve used JapanesePod101 for quite some time and I take university art and design students to Japan pretty much once a year and ALWAYS urge them to use JapanesePod101, and they do. I’ve witnessed them use what they’ve learned in Japan, and they tell me that JPod101 really helps them. So as always, どうもありがとうございます！！
Monday at 4:49 am
お疲れ様でした
Monday at 6:36 am
JP101!
It was good to know everyone else involve at JP101!
but please I want to know when is the new audio blog coming out? 
I want to keep up like one else, thank you. 
S_R_C
Monday at 12:27 pm
You are an attractive and dynamic bunch and do a very good job with this program. There’s always room for improvement, of course, as seen in how you’ve wisely continued to develop the program since you began. I have spent the last two and a half months (I’m retired) going through every lesson in the Upper Intermediate (I joined up for Advanced only to discover it doesn’t exist), and have listened to every audio blog. I am now repeating the process for review. This has helped see some of the areas in which the lessons can be improved–or at least, has shown me what I feel I myself need. As an on-again, off-again student of Japanese for longer than any of your team has been on earth, and have gone through at least a seven or eight of the best textbook programs, mostly without a teacher. I want to master this damned language before I die, even though I know it well enough to have published respected translations. The lack of speaking experiences (except for the occasional month or two I spend in Japan) has deprived me of confidence in conversing, so I continue to search for new audio programs to at least improve listening comprehension. Your audio materials are always useful, and I always learn something new from them, but they remain Upper Intermediate because they are so planned. There are glimmers of real talk during some of the explanatory chatter in a limited number of lessons, so you might think of adding real conversations among your staff (with lesson links) and not scripted ones if your technical and economic conditions allow. And if you could contrive a system where students can actually speak sentences in response to audible questions, and then check the accuracy of what they’ve said, it might prove valuable to many students. If something more like real conversation could be constructed, clumsy as it’s likely to be, that too would be significant. Anyway, I hadn’t meant to be this windy, and now I’ll return to listening to your lessons.
Monday at 2:00 pm
Kabukiguy, I agree with everything you wrote. This site is great but advanced lessons of the sort you mention would be a very welcome addition. There’s been some vigorous discussion by like-minded people on the forum, which might interest you. A couple suggestions for finding more advanced/realistic listening material:
1. Fire up iTunes, switch it to Japanese, find some Japanese podcasts that interest you and subscribe. There are a ton.
2. Get Japanese movies on DVD that have Japanese subtitles. After watching once with no subtitles, use the subtitles to confirm the things you couldn’t catch or are new expressions for you.
3. There’s some good Japanese TV footage on YouTube and similar sites although more and more its getting pulled for copyright reasons.
Monday at 9:57 pm
good to see them. its always a mystery when you hear a someones voice in lesson for about 3 years less time for newer hosts.
so its good to see who Talking.
Hiroko werer use to since she does the video Lessons.
Monday at 11:26 pm
Julie-san, maido! Thanks all the comments.
Ryuda-san, arigatou gozaimasu! We’ll try to put together a video one of these days.
Mimi-san, arigatou gozaimasu! Thanks for the great message.
Fer-san, arigatou gozaimasu! Thanks for the awesome comment. Sakura got a kick out of it! On a side note, the pictures were actually taken by a listener of ours from Hawaii who came to visit. Todd-san (the listener) is a video/photo guru, so he made it happen. Fun day!
Edwin-san, thank you for listening! It’s thanks to you that this was realized. Arigatou gozaimasu!
Stanley-san, 本当にありがとうございます！。Thanks for all the support and for spreading the word! We really appreciate it! (bow)
Rigo-san, ありがとうございます！
Kabukiguy-san, the female talent were quite smitten by your first line!
Thanks for the great feedback. We’re currently in the bat cave working on some really interesting projects and surprises. While our reaction time is slower these days, we are listening. 
Please keep the great feedback coming, and we’re currently working on some advanced language learning material. 
Your great feedback will definitely be factored in. Thx!
Shimewaza-san, again. Thank you for the great feedback. We were actually discussing that thread the other day. Advanced material is a topic we’re hoping to tackle this year. Also, great advice on access to advanced Japanese.
Raymasaki-san arigatou gozaimasu! Thanks for listening along with us!
Wow, feels really great to comment again! Have been locked in the lab working on a big project, and they finally let me out. hehe.
Thanks again everyone! We truly appreciate your support! And look forward to many more years together.
Monday at 11:28 pm
Ｓｉｎｄｙシンディーさん、ごめん！Thanks for listening all these years.
We’ll keep you posted on the audio blog, as it’s looking like the second half of the year. よろしくお願いします！
Tuesday at 1:04 am
It’s great to see these recent responses, and thanks to Shimezawa for the suggestions. For me, the problem is not so much finding stuff to listen to, which is abundant, of course, but of being able to talk back, even in the form of drills. A lot of programs pooh-pooh drills and try what they say are more up-to-date pedagogical methods, but I’ve always credited the drills I practiced for whatever abilities I have. Anyway, more actual conversational experiences are crucial to learning Japanese. Anyone who listens over and over to the lessons on programs like Japanesepod101 will certainly improve their comprehension skills, but only to a limit. Once they go to Japan and hear a real conversation they’ll realize how little they actually know, as most of what they hear will be incomprehensible and will require one on one experience with native speakers. There are (or were) some commercially available programs on tape (pre-CD), like インタビューで日本語 (from Bonjinsha) and a similar one for newscasts, but their written materials were entirely in Japanese. If you’re going to publish a training program for people to listen to advanced Japanese conversation, and there are no translations provided to follow the dialogue, why bother? Anyone able to comprehend such advanced-level conversations wouldn’t need such a program. Even in the transcripts one can’t make heads or tails of much of the dialogue because of all the contractions and other conversational tics used by the speakers. One good thing about the Japanesepod101 lessons is the translations, although these sometimes do have problems of accuracy or nonliteralness. Also, students shouldn’t be lulled into complacency by the clarity of the speakers on these lessons. The speakers are all actors or voice-over professionals, and they are always easy to follow. Listen, however, to how everyday Japanese people speak (as on the tapes I mentioned), and you’ll soon realize how artificial the lessons are from the point of listening to “real” Japanese. This is true of practically every advanced Japanese program I’ve ever used, so it’s not Japanesepod101’s fault for following the same path. Finally, I should mention that there’s a challenging new program available with an accompanying DVD where you get to actually see the speakers, who are everyday Japanese, and to follow their words in a textbook. Again, unfortunately, although much of the text is in English, the conversations are not translated, so you have to struggle with much of the material, but it’s a step in the right direction: it’s called Living Japanese (Ikita Nihongo), by Karen Colligan-Taylor, and is from Yale UP. Listening to people talking spontaneously, with all their hesitations, sucking of breath, self-corrections, verbal abbreviations, slang, swallowing of final words (just as in any language) will show you what actual Japanese sounds like, not the overly formal constructions and excellent speaking (often at a slowed-down pace) of the average language program. I’m hoping Japanesepod101 moves in this direction some day. I keep wondering: when all the non-native speakers involved in Japanesepod101 learned Japanese, how did they achieve fluency? By the methods provided here or in some other way?
Tuesday at 1:05 am
@all of jpod101.com ありがとうございました。今年もよろしくお願いします。
@peterさん, thanks for continuing to be so integrated into lessons. It gives the site a family feel more than a corporate feel if you know what I mean. Also, a big thanks for what you and your team did for the audio on wwwjdic. I laughed pretty hard when your voice came up ‘the audio for this will uploaded shortly’.
@jessiさん, thanks for taking care of the comment and forum sections. Its a big deal to me and I’m sure many others knowing that the jpod101.com staff values all of our posts.
Tuesday at 5:44 am
Peter-san!
ありがとうございました。 I never had the change to say it but I’m really sorry for all those bad comments I made in the past, I learn my lesson and thanks to you and JP101, I learned hiragana and Katakana. I’m struggling myself now with Kanji and I’m very happy to be a listener all this years. I’m 25 years old now and I’m try to be more muture from now on. Thank you again and hope to meet you and all this wonderful team in the future.
S_R_C
Tuesday at 5:44 pm
Kabukiguy,
I have Living Japanese too and I agree that its good. You are right that students of Japanese can get a false sense of security when listening only to prepared dialogues. Jumping into the deep end too soon is just discouraging, so these dialogues definitely have their place. But when a certain level is reached, perhaps intermediate, I think the student should start taking the plunge. The Japanese podcasts, DVD’s, and TV shows, having been made for a Japanese audience, are certainly the raw Japanese you refer to but you can pause, replay, and check the Japanese subtitles in the case of DVD’s, so that’s why I like using them.
For sure, just passive listening is much less effective than drilling out loud or even better practicing with a partner. I find the key to fixing new Japanese words and expression in my head, is to actually successfully use them in a spontaneous conversation. If you don’t have partners to practice with, you might check out this Skype language exchange site:
http://www.language-exchanges.org/
Regarding the comparatively few advanced lessons that I’ve encountered, while a full English translation is great if provided, personally I’m happy if there is simply a Japanese transcript (Thank god for Eijiro and Rikaichan). Anything else is icing. I’m looking forward to seeing what Japanesepod101 instructors come up with.
PS: I put it on the Forum post I mentioned before but here it is again in case you haven’t seen it. I think this might be the kind of Japanese you are after.
http://www.voiceblog.jp/japaneselistening/
http://japaneselistening.blogspot.com/
This one is also pretty good
http://www.njuku.com/
Wednesday at 6:31 am
This is great, Shimezawa-san. I hadn’t seen or known about these sites. You’ve really been helpful.
Sunday at 10:53 pm
I studied a lot using JP101 last summer during my summer break back in the UK, and learnt so much useful stuff that has actually helped me with my English teaching here in Tokyo… from the simple things such as Onomatopaea sounds such as “parapara” to useful idioms such as “asameshimae”…. the lessons are easy to relate to, and I don’t feel I have my head stuck in a coursebook.
You guys are legends!
Monday at 10:17 am
kabukiguyさん and Shimezawaさん,
Thanks for your suggestions about advanced lessons, and thank you also for the links. We’re looking into them to get ideas for possible advanced lessons ideas. Thanks again!
graeme.さん,
Thanks for your nice comment!! I do the best I can to try and keep up with the comments and forums and get back to everyone
Markさん,
Thank you for your kind words! So you are living in Japan now? We’re really glad to hear that you find the content useful!
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