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