Postby Bueller_007 » September 7th, 2006 8:09 am
The key is maintaining a soap-opera continuing-saga feel, and using that as the key to teaching, rather than making each lesson specifically focus on one grammar point. Grammar should be well integrated into the lesson, but not so much that it is *the focus*.
And that's pretty much what they're doing now, hooking readers with *content*, not grammar. You get people hooked on the show and they'll learn Japanese through exposure and have a good time doing it.
You'll run out of grammar points eventually, but some soap operas have continued for 30, 40 years, and still enjoy sizable and highly profitable viewership.
In order to maintain the continuing saga, I think it might be necessary for jpod to move to a set "season" schedule, like they have on TV. It would give each character an opportunity to have a "character arc", and at the end of each season, you would take out the trash, so to speak, and tie up all of the loose ends. Otherwise it'll play out too similar to a rambling soap opera, rather than a focused season of 24.
One other issue to consider is how to integrate upper-level Japanese into the show, which is usually highly formal, and often archaic, written Japanese, which is not easily taught through the podcast format. Business Japanese lessons could be done relatively easily, and would probably satisfy most upper-level learners practical needs, but wouldn't be quite enough prep to get them to JLPT 1.
Of course, this is a podcast about practical Japanese, and it could be argued that a lot of the stuff on JLPT 1 doesn't fall into that category.
