Some of you may have noticed that the "Contains" and "Ends with" search methods of the word dictionary in the Learningcenter are gone. We changed the way the dictionary works to improve performance, and to take a large step closer to providing you more accurate search results. Therefore it now returns results ordered by relevance. The order is not perfect, processing natural language with computers is difficult, but it should be much better than before ;) Now I will explain by example how the remaining search methods work: The default "Is" method will now also search inside English phrases. A search for "way" for example will still find "途中 - on the way, en route, midway". It will also find "one-way traffic", but will not find... Show more

After weeks of development, we're happy to announce the launch of the much anticipated My Feed. This fully customizable RSS feed lets Premium members decide exactly what lesson content they want on their Premium feed. Setting up My Feed is a a simple 3 step process. Choose the lesson types you want (e.g. Beginner, Newbie, Audio Blog, etc.) Choose the type of content you want (e.g. Main Audio, Dialog Clip, Review Clip, PDF, Video Vocab, etc.) Add My Feed to iTunes or other iTunes compatible feed readers like Juice, and just watch the content you want come rolling in. To learn more about My Feed check out the video below or if you're a Premium member, click here to get started now. Thank you all for your continued... Show more

Mina-san, I hope you enjoyed the holidays! Since we started doing the intros at the beginning of the lessons, we got tons of questions about them. To address these, we did 2 Japanese Culture Classes and explained a few of them. We'll definitely be doing more Culture Classes on the intros (as well as other cultural topics). But we went ahead and added a new section to the Lesson Notes. Now you can find the Japanese transcript and corresponding English translation after the Grammar Point. We hope this helps make a little sense out of the madness （笑）. I think this will be particularly helpful for the 2008 intros which all involve a mini-drama running from Monday to Friday. Enjoy! マーキー

Hope everyone is enjoying their holiday season. With the year coming to a close we managed to squeeze in two more exciting enhancements. Lesson Browser The new lesson browser was developed with simplicity and convenience in mind. Broken down into "Core Lessons" and "Extra Lessons", this new features lets you quickly find the lessons you love. The new browser offers the following functionality: Brief description of each lesson level for new users coming in contact with JapanesePod101.com for the first time A Quick Jump menu to quickly find your favorite lessons within a particular level Sort functionality to arrange lessons by date (newest first or oldest first) A global search functionality to find any lesson by searching... Show more

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that's associated with your email and follows you from blog to blog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar-enabled blogs. The comment section of the JapanesePod101.com are now gravatar-enabled. If you don't have a gravatar, you can easily get one for free at Gravatar.com. Just be sure to use the same email address that you use to post comments on the JapanesePod101.com blog. Please note that it might take a few minutes for your shiny new gravatar to show up on our comment system.

Mina-san, We are pleased to announce that a new "remember me" function is now available. When you login to JapanesePod101.com you will now have the option to check a "Remember me?" box. If you do, you won't have to login again from that same computer for up to 7 days! To turn on the remember me functionality, simply click the checkbox next to the Login and Password fields. Then when you are finished interacting with the site - just close the browser window - do not logout (logging out erases the remember me ability). If you accidentally clicked the remember me option, don't worry - just be sure to fully logout of the site before leaving. The next time you visit the site, you will be asked to login again. If you... Show more

On November 13th, Zune launched its new Zune Software, Zune Social, Zune Marketplace and the Zune firmware. This release marks the official support of audio and video podcasting for Zune. JapanesePod101.com was among 1000 featured podcast feeds to come pre-seeded in the Zune Marketplace Podcast Directory (KoreanClass101.com and SurvivalPhrases.com are soon to follow). Podcast lovers can now find, play, subscribe, share, organize, and give feedback about their favorite podcasts (hint hint) Here's a screen shot of the JapanesePod101.com podcast in the Marketplace Podcast Directory (click to enlarge) Next is a screen shot of my favorite podcasts in my Zune Podcast Collection (click to enlarge) Zune also supports an easy... Show more

こんにちは、皆様。ジェイソンです。 Hi, everybody! Jason here to tell you about some enhancements we've recently made to JapanesePod101.com. Due to spam attacks on the forums, we've implemented a couple of security features to help prevent future attacks. One is that new users who have less than 10 posts will be required to enter a randomly generated security code when making a post to confirm that they are in fact human and not a spambot. The other is that new users will not be allowed to post images until they have both made at least 10 imageless posts and have been registered for at least a week. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause to new forum posters, but we hope you will bear with us as we try to protect ourselves and our members... Show more

Mina-san, Earlier this week we announced the launch of the Dialog and Review premium clips, which I hope everyone is enjoying. Today, we are glad to announce the much anticipated release of two more essential premium features which are sure to take your writing and speaking skills to new heights. Kana Stroke Order Videos The Kana Stroke Order Videos show you the proper stroke order for all basic Hiragana and Katakana characters. The videos, which include the sound of each character, show you exactly how to write each character stroke by stroke. They are available for all active Premium subscribers on the Hiragana Chart and Katakana Chart pages in the Reference Material section of our Learning Center. Below is a sample of one of... Show more

Mina-san, Marky here! As you can probably tell, JapanesePod101.com is truly a labor of love for us! We love learning and teaching Japanese and honestly, we’re having a lot of fun. But we’re always trying to think of ways to improve what we’re doing or thinking “how can we do something different?” And often the best ideas come from you all! Introducing 2 new Tracks added to the Premium Feed! The Review Track A lot of people have asked us to leave some blank space when introducing vocab so they could have some time to repeat and practice. Well, if you’ve been with us a while, you know we tried a while back. We had some good feedback about that, but it dragged the podcasts on with silence and ate up time for going through... Show more