erlog Wrote:Japanese Pod 101 would be awesome if they didn't make the entire thing so annoying. Even just being signed up is annoying because they constantly bug you with emails. If you're not a paying subscriber yet they bug you even more, and every time they go, "We have this new double secret super cheap deal we didn't tell you about before." It's the internet equivalent of an infomercial.

Damn - just signed up for the free service, and in a few hours, 4 e-mails from them.
Spam Filter ON.

I agree - all the commercialization on the website and even in the audio makes the product look and sound cheap. Too bad.

KanjiHanzi Wrote:... or ChinesePod.com too?

Woah! ChinesePod.com is $49/month. What are they smoking?

I have to admit, recordings for Mandarin are more useful than recordings for Japanese (pronunciation and pitch is harder in Mandarin) and their recording quality is excellent, but this is a little steep...

kfmfe04 Wrote:Woah! ChinesePod.com is $49/month. What are they smoking?

What kind of service is that for?
I paid $40 (60 minus 30%) for a year of basic on Jpod.
For $49/month are happy ending included

I just wanted to post and say the comments on jpod101.com are mostly accurate. I actually think their lessons (even the newbie and beginner courses) are very good for people starting out in Japanese. Listening to their lessons improved my listening skills, increased my passive vocabulary, and increased my confidence to an unreasonable level

Listening skill made other Japanese material more interesting/informative, and of course recognizing more words helps too. The unreasonable confidence is probably the biggest asset though - it lead me to try playing games in Japanese, to try reading manga and novels, and generally to work above my actual level. And when I failed it provoked me to work harder on grammar and vocabulary.

Two notes on what their lessons didn't do for me though: They didn't teach me any grammer, and they didn't teach me anything about reading! None of their grammar points had any impact on me, the only grammar information I gained was from hearing things I had read about from other sources used in context. As for reading, well nothing really helps until you know the kana, and once you know those you still need some way to learn kanji

As for subscriptions: I only ever paid when they had some deal running. Paying gives you access to extra audio tracks and their pdfs. The extra audio isn't particularly helpful. Unfortunatly the pdfs are _NOT_ rendered using japanese fonts, instead all the Japanese has been converted to images? As a result you can't copy/paste from their pdfs!

So the extra media is mediocre, the pdfs are less than useful, and their 'learning center' isn't anything spectacular. I would sugest staying away from their subscriptions. Also they are a recurring payment by default and have to be 'canceled' to stop automatic deductions, and by default you get spammed every day about new lessons. In the last year or so their site and services have gotten more annoying. I think you can bypass the annoying frontpage thing by going directly to http://www.japanesepod101.com/index.php but I'm not sure how the download restrictions work for non-subscribers now.

BTW I use DownLoadThemAll for Firefox to grab all the mp3s quickly!

For those of you having problems viewing the transcript:

If you can see the file in iTunes, right-click it and select the last option, it should be something like "more information" or something along those lines. One of the tabs contains the transcript.

kfmfe04 Wrote:

KanjiHanzi Wrote:... or ChinesePod.com too?

Woah! ChinesePod.com is $49/month. What are they smoking?

Thanks for the feedback, all

No, it's not $49/month for Premium services. I paid $29/month. The higher price includes some extras like private tuition or something like that. "Business class" :-)

Where I prefer ChinesePod.com over JapanesePod101.com is the community section on each and every lesson. It's really nice being able to IMMEDIATELY interact with both the producers and fellow students. A really smart feature, in my opinion

I got this rather strange letter from JapanesePod101 yesterday:

Peter Galante Wrote:Subject: Kanji, I'm confused. Are you getting my emails?

Hi Kanji,

There's something that has me confused.

I noticed you haven't upgraded your
JapanesePod101.com membership to Premium yet and
that you only have 4 days left of Free
Access to Basic and Premium tools.

I'm sure there's a good reason you haven't signed
up yet. I know that you may not have had the time
yet to check out everything we have to offer,
like..

Hmmm... I am absolutely convinced that this is an automated message sent to everyone signing up for a 7 days free ride. It appears to me like a not very honest marketing ploy to make people insecure enough to jump on the paid-for-services. Did NOT impress me at all. "confused" ?!?!?! Hmmmm..... Misleading?!?!?

I have a basic sub because I want the PDF texts. I believe that reading and listening together strengthens both skills. If you want to subscribe wait for one of the periodic special deals. They seem to come along every few months.

Kitsu mentioned that the PDF files don't use Japanese fonts but that is no longer the case. I'm not sure when they changed over but the PDFs these days allow copying and pasting of the content into another application.

I've been looking around a bit more and seem to have missed the distinction between the Newbie and the Beginner levels. I also see that I was incorrect in saying that JapanesePod101 didn't have the ability to interact with the rest of the world. At least the newbie pages have some sort of comment function; don't know about the other levels yet.

Anybody able to tell the difference between Newbie and Beginner there? Yo me it seems they both start out at roughly the same point, but adding a bit more kanji on the beginner level?!?!

I *do* think I possibly could get used to Peter too, thanks to the Japanese partners he has in the lessons :-) Eventually.

kitsu Wrote:As for subscriptions: I only ever paid when they had some deal running. Paying gives you access to extra audio tracks and their pdfs.

x2. Keep your eyes peeled for available coupons. I dug around on their site after my 7-day subscription expired & located a 50% off coupon that I used last week. $30/year for a basic subscription is well worth the price for good structured audio & PDF notes (IMHO). And yes, I found the email spam during the trial period irritating as well.

kitsu Wrote:Unfortunatly the pdfs are _NOT_ rendered using japanese fonts, instead all the Japanese has been converted to images? As a result you can't copy/paste from their pdfs!

This concerned me as well when I first considered signing up a year ago, but it apparently is not 100% true anymore. For fun I started skimming their Nihongo Dojo lessons (the new format Newbie lessons starting with #31) to see what changes were made, & discovered that I could copy/paste off PDFs into iKnow with ease. This was a topic of discussion/complaint on their forums & was apparently addressed in newer lessons, but older lesson note PDFs have not been fixed yet (for whatever reason).

KanjiHanzi Wrote:Anybody able to tell the difference between Newbie and Beginner there? Yo me it seems they both start out at roughly the same point, but adding a bit more kanji on the beginner level?!?!

According to their website link: http://www.japanesepod101.com/help-center/the-courses/

"If you are a true newbie, we recommend starting with Newbie Season 2 “Nihongo Dojo” supplemented by Beginner Season 1 for the fastest and most fun way to get started with Japanese! The Nihongo Dojo is a very structured curriculum and Beginner Season 1 takes a more casual approach based on repetition."

I agree with this statement. The Nihongo Dojo lessons are more structured & the PDFs more detailed (read: useful) compared to the beginner versions. In other words, learn the concentrated nuts & bolts with Niongo Dojo, then casually listen to equivalent Beginner Lessons (only if you want) to get additional exposure to related concepts. Keep in mind that the Nihongo Dojo & early beginner lessons don't overlap perfectly though.

BigAmish Wrote:This concerned me as well when I first considered signing up a year ago, but it apparently is not 100% true anymore. For fun I started skimming their Nihongo Dojo lessons (the new format Newbie lessons starting with #31) to see what changes were made, & discovered that I could copy/paste off PDFs into iKnow with ease. This was a topic of discussion/complaint on their forums & was apparently addressed in newer lessons, but older lesson note PDFs have not been fixed yet (for whatever reason).

This is good to hear. It'll really speed up sentence mining for AJATT's sentences.

Remember guys, you don't have to pay to get just the dialogues etc, just put the mp3 in Audacity and cut out the dialogue into an mp3. Then you can loop that instead of having to listen to all the talk and having to fast forward.

Thats pretty cool if they fixed their pdf rendering! Unfortunately they probably didn't go back and fix the older lessons, so anything older than about six months(?) is readonly.

Also about the mp3s - The tagging has gotten better in the last year, but is still fairly inconsistent. They started adding transcripts to the lyrics field of the files though, so that can supplement the readonly pdfs.

Tobberoth Wrote:Remember guys, you don't have to pay to get just the dialogues etc, just put the mp3 in Audacity and cut out the dialogue into an mp3. Then you can loop that instead of having to listen to all the talk and having to fast forward.

You can sign up for a free one week trial and download everything they have using the DownThemAll firefox extension (or any other download managers you have) rather easily. I haven't downloaded everything yet, but I'd say it's 6 or 7 gigs max for the complete set of JPod101 lessons + pdfs right now.

Also, even if they didn't fix the pdf rendering, I'm sure you can type out the readings they provide and eyeball the right kanji to use in the IME.

By the way, most (if not all) of the lessons have the dialogs available as a separate download in each lesson.

Speaking of which, I only recently discovered the stroke recognition pad for the Japanese IME language bar, where you just use the mouse or whatnot to draw a stroke or two (or more, of course) and can select from the kanji that appear. I've only had cause to use it a handful of times this year but still, quite nice, for when I spot an unknown character in a film or dorama.

vgambit Wrote:You can sign up for a free one week trial and download everything they have using the DownThemAll firefox extension (or any other download managers you have) rather easily. I haven't downloaded everything yet, but I'd say it's 6 or 7 gigs max for the complete set of JPod101 lessons + pdfs right now.

I considered this, but after a few days of playing with the system I concluded it was well worth it. I am not above downloading whatever I feel like, be it software, music, w/e. However, with Jpod I felt like I can afford 40$ for a year.

I just tried it out, and it seems pretty cool, nest0r. I didn't know Microsoft had something like that.

oregum Wrote:

vgambit Wrote:You can sign up for a free one week trial and download everything they have using the DownThemAll firefox extension (or any other download managers you have) rather easily. I haven't downloaded everything yet, but I'd say it's 6 or 7 gigs max for the complete set of JPod101 lessons + pdfs right now.

I considered this, but after a few days of playing with the system I concluded it was well worth it. I am not above downloading whatever I feel like, be it software, music, w/e. However, with Jpod I felt like I can afford 40$ for a year.

If you can afford it, go right ahead. There are certainly some benefits (like the line-by-line transcripts with the audio link right next to each sentence) to purchasing an account. However, quite a large portion of the stuff contained on JPod101 can be downloaded during the trial, so even though you might find that sketchy, I would say it's perfectly legal. The podcast used to be freely available, anyway.

Yes, the Windows stroke recognition can be a Gift from God frequently. I use it when I find a Kanji/Hanzi I don't know: I draw it into a Word document and the paste it into a dictionary. (This I don't have to do with Chinese/Mandarin since the Wenlin dicitonary has its own stroke recognition pad to enter Hanzi).

I also use the Chinese ' dictionary' - they are absolutely correct when they claim it's much more than a dictionary - at http://nciku.com where there is a stroke pad too. Really, really nice. And then they have good looking stroke order animation for almost every character.

Question (since I am too busy right now to search the posts here): Anything on the same or equal level for Japanese? Please, take a look at nciku first :-)

Wow nciku seems really impressive.. the only thing close would be jisho.org which is a good J-E dictionary... but it sure doesn't have stroke recognition. Thanks for the link, I'll keep it for my future mandarin studies!

Personally, I really rarely use stroke recognition, i use radical search on jisho.org which is very fast once you've gotten used to it AND it makes sure you keep training your eye for separating kanji into primitives.

For people who really like stroke recognition and want to use other operating systems, I recommend scim-tomoe on Linux. It installs stroke recognition similar (IMO superior) to Microsofts IME into your SCIM IME.