How many lessons will be produced?

[seasurfer]

Hi everyone,

I have been on this site for one month, first and foremost, I would like to thanks everyone in jpod101, you all really did an excellent job, my Japanese improved a lot. Thanks.

I wonder how many lessons will jpod101 produce for each level?

[Airth]

Well, assuming they can develop and maintain a business model that turns a consistent profit and keep up their level of enthusiasm, then I'd say the answer is a never-ending stream of lessons.

It has been argued that the Beginner lessons inevitably transform into Intermediate ones, but I don't think that is necessarily so. Most of the grammar points are dealt with quite quickly in each lesson, leaving them the option to go back, review and strengthen each point. The number of lessons is only limited by their powers of creativity.

Long may they continue...

[Jason]

Until Peter lands that commercial for teeth whitening strips and takes off to Hollywood.

But the serious answer is, no one knows. There isn't exactly a shortage of content to cover.

[Bueller_007]

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.