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 the title or description fields.

Grammar Bank Search
With over 100 Japanese grammar constructions, the Grammar Bank, available in our Premium Learning Center, was getting a bit unwieldy. So to make finding grammar items a bit easier, we’ve added a full text search functionality. Search the Kanji, Kana, English, Samples, Formation, Notes, and Explanation fields to find the grammar you want to master.

As for future features, our content and product development teams have a ton of new and exciting enhancements for 2008. So stay tuned for more announcements.

As always, leave us a comment and let us know what you think of these new features and how we can make them better.

Don’t forget our 25% Off Holiday Sale expires in just a few days, so now is the perfect time to pick up a Basic or Premium subscription. For more information about this promotion, visit this page.

Thank you for a wonderful 2007, and a happy and healthy New Year to everyone.

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 encounter any issues with this new functionality or wish to see it enhanced in some way, please post a comment or shoot us an email.

Yoroshiku onegai shimasu!

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 “1-Click Podcast Subscription” process that allows podcast listeners and viewers to subscribe to their favorite shows. According to Zune, “this 1-Click process will launch the new Zune Marketplace software and place the podcast subscription in the users collection. The process will work best if the Zune user already has the new Zune Marketplace software loaded on a Windows PC, but if not already installed, will then ask user to download the software.”

We’ve added a 1-Click chicklet graphic (like the one below) to the sidebar of our JapanesePod101.com page.

Please be sure to post your experiences with the new Zune.

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 from spam. These changes will not affect established forum posters.

In addition to the forum security enhancements, the word dictionary in the Learning Center has also received some upgrades. You now have 4 search options: Contains (match your search query anywhere), Is (match your search query exactly), Starts with, and Ends with. The dictionary will also now match class 3 verbs (verbs that are made of a noun+する) whether or not you include する in your search query. You can see both of these new features in action in the screenshot below.

Thank you all for your continuing feedback and support! Without it we simply could not do what we do. We hope you’ll like these new features and those that will come. 今後とも、よろしくお願いします！

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 these videos (requires Quicktime to view):

[qt:https://www.japanesepod101.com/mobile/strokes-hira_ho-Strokes.mov 320 300]

Pronunciation Practice
To address speaking practice, we have integrated a state-of-the-art software to allow you to record your own voice so you can compare your pronunciation to our teachers and continue to refine your speaking skills. This feature is available to all active Premium subscribers in the Kanji, Kana, and Romaji sections of the Line-By-Line Audio Transcript page for each lesson in the Learning Center (see screenshot below):

We hope you enjoy these new premium features and as always please let us know what you think.

Yoroshiku onegai shimasu!

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 grammar points and focusing on the stories. But now we’ll begin offering a separate audio download that will focus on getting your pronunciation and pitch accent correct. We’ll review the vocab and phrases introduced in each podcast lesson. In future lessons, we may vary this a little, so we’d love to hear your feedback.

The Dialog Track

Again, a lot of people asked us if we could include a separate track that has only the conversation without the lesson. Again, if you’ve been with us a while, you know we toyed around with this idea in the Learning Center in the past (combining 2 part stories, etc…). Well, now we’ve decided to officially include this in the Premium Feed so you can take it with you on the go!

Introducing Newbie Appendix Tracks

Included with our usually free podcast lesson, we’ve decided to supplement Naomi Sensei’s Newbie course with some occasional appendixes. This week we were covering numbers, so we thought it would be nice to dedicate some audio specifically for this reason. This won’t be for every lesson, but when we tackle some important topics we thought it’d be better to separate this detailed info from the regular podcast lesson. Hopefully we can stay more focused this way. (fingers crossed, LOL).

Of course, the occasional bonus track will be called for. These will be anything from supplementary material, off-topic discussions, studio outtakes, etc. We’ve always had a lot of fun with these so we’ll keep at it.

Ask a Sensei!

Also, this week we will be going into the studio with Yano Sensei to address the questions you submitted to us. We’re really excited about this because a lot of you have told us you don’t have a Japanese teacher or can’t take classes in your area. I think this is a cool way to put you in touch with a man who has A LOT OF EXPERIENCE teaching Japanese. If you don’t know what this is all about, then please check our earlier post:
Your Turn to Interview a Sensei

O-Bon Kaidan

And if that wasn’t enough to keep us working late while everyone else has お盆休み, I wanna talk about something I’m really excited about.
We’ve been talking up our ghost stories lately. But why did we decide to this?
Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, Yūki-san and I were talking one day about the Edo Period tradition of 百物語怪談 (100 Ghost Stories). This happened duing O-Bon season, families and friends would gather together and light 100 candles. People would take turns telling a ghost story. After the story finished, 1 candle was put out. This carried on until the last story was told and the final candle extinguished. It was said a ghost would come into the room at this time. Now, exactly why people wanted to hang out with a ghost, I can’t really say. But I’m sure a lot of great stories were told! So we thought, let’s try something totally different from other JPod lessons. Let’s take a break from the lesson format, and just tell some stories. It’s our way of thanking the Basic and Premium listeners for supporting us. It also gave us a chance to do something really cool. Like I said before, we love what we’re doing so this was a bonus for us too! We really hope you enjoy these stories.

On that note, I’d like to refer to you a cool site. This is for Zenshoan Temple which has a famous (well, not really) gallery of 幽霊画 (Yuurei-ga), or paintings of ghosts. Very, very cool stuff.
https://www.theway.jp/zen/html/gallary/somnailindex.html

As with anything we do here, we’d love to hear your feedback!

宜しくお願いします♪

マーキー

We are pleased to announce that very soon we’ll be a launching a new header and footer design on JapanesePod101.com. Here are the key changes that will be introduced in the new design:

1. New Header Navigation – We conveniently separated out “Help Center”, “About Us”, and “Contact Us” from the main header menu to reduce the clutter and improve navigation.
2. Footer Quick Links – We expanded the number of links available in the footer to allow users to quickly and easily access the information they seek.
3. A Fresh New Look – Last but not least, we felt it was time to give the header and footer a fresh new look.

We hope you like what you see and find the navigational tools overall more useful. Below is a screenshot of the new header and footer design. To view a full-size version, please click here.

Mina-san,

It’s been a busy few weeks here at JapanesePod101.com… on top of the recently launched Learning Center v2.0 and the Premium Podcast Feed, today we updated our homepage. Now when you visit our homepage, you’ll see a new and streamlined 2-column design that makes it easier and faster than ever to find the information you’re looking for.

Take a look and tell us what you think by leaving us a comment or sending us an email at support@japanesepod101.com.

Yoroshiku onegai shimasu.

JapanesePod101.com