I use a fair few internet resources - pod101 and iKnow are the main ones and struggling to listen properly to anime (number 1 fan of Stein's Gate). Thanks for the tip on l
Lingq - I will try it once they recover from the current denial of service attack!

I did like the structure of Jpod, and one of the reasons is that you don't have to figure out how to use what, because they explain it.
With LingQ, you do have to do that work yourself. (Which might be enough at an Upper Intermediate level though, but not before you get there)

Sure, you could download their audio off their site, but that's not the whole thing. LingQ only has the audio, without any helpful explanations, and by natives.To get all the info on your audio, you need to work on it. Grab the unknown words and look up unknown grammar, while you get that while listening to Jpod.

I do like LingQ, but it's no replacement. It's another thing altogether.

I also like the show format of Jpod. It's not just a lesson, it's entertaining. Matter of taste, I give you that, but since it worked out for me, I'm satisfied.

What real alternatives to Jpod do exist? Not really any, right? If we mention Pimsleur and Michel Thomas, people will something to criticize those for, too, although I found both to be great tools, too.

Heck, I even pirated a copy of Rosetta Stone in the beginning and found it helpful to get my feet wet.

I am actually quite a fan of pimsleur. It has some drawbacks particularly in that it is limited to the polite level and is limited to 90 lessons in all. But it does force you to speak and having run through it when I was a beginner and later when I knew a bit more I was surprised at just how many interesting grammar structures they sneak in to it.

Absolutely. I started with Pimsleur, found it a bit tough, then did that RS copy for a while , then started Pimsleur earnestly. After that, I did Michel Thomas. At that point, I could already have simple conversations with natives on Twitter, as I learned Hiragana on smart.fm (now iknow). That's how it can be used if you're willing to do it seriously. People underestimate the material IMHO. Japanesepod then helped my Japanese a great deal over the course of another 2 years or so.

I did additional stuff after Pimsleur was done, but only after I was done with Pimsleur. And I won't look back. It was a good decision at that time.

By the way, I'm a fan of Stein's Gate, too. Currently playing it again, this time in Japanese.

Pimsleur is very good at improving your accent and your spontaneity. I used it before exams in Dutch and Japanese and always managed to impress the examiner. There aren't many efficient tools that can give you a good accent, so even though Pimsleur's can be quite boring, I've never felt like it was a waste of my time. Just don't expect it to teach you any grammar and more than a few vocabulary words (that you won't be able to write).
I've found JPod's intermediate lessons are nice to listen to when you're doing something that prevents you from reading, or when you're too tired for anything more demanding. Their portability is useful too.
It's all about what you expect from specific material (and how you use it, obviously), I suppose.

Of course you can't write a word after you only learned it from Pimsleur, but as soon as you learn Hiragana, you already have a certain vocabulary you only have to look up once (if at all), and it all comes together. Then you do Michel Thomas, which has some vocab overlap, but also teaches you new verbs, for example, and you expand on it. Michel Thomas then teaches the grammar you used already 100 times in Pimsleur, so you're already familiar with it, but it gives you the ability to use it "freestyle" now, because you now know what you're doing. You won't have to do any of these courses twice.

And I think that most libraries would order them for you, if you're not the type to sail to certain bays where a certain type of evil sailors give you these programs.

Or, and I know this is probably too radical for some, you could pay for them. After all a huge amount of work goes into making these things and if nobody pays they will not be made.

I like Michel Thomas as a teacher but I found the 'stupid' student too much to bear on a second hearing even though I am probably even stupider.

But of course. That's what all of us good citizens do, isn't it. ^^

Er . . . nearly always . . .