Has anyone went the complete way through the Jpod series's.. and if so, what is the general consensus?
I've gone through Newbie series 2-3 (as they join on and series 1 and 4 seem to be rehashes) obviously they are a bit simple, but if you were to supplement, SRSing, Iknow, talking with natives and other such studying, would working your way from point 1 - the end; be benificial?

I mean yes, obviously.. but what is the pacing like, etc. is it likely to go so slowly i'd overtake it with other methods making it obselete.
I start university in a month and i was considering buying myself a cheap mp3 player with a decent sized hard drive and working my way from beginner to expert over the year, couple lessons a day etc.
I don't want to make such a time, money investment in something that will provide minimal benifits.
I mean from what i can take from the newbie series is... it goes a little slow, Naomi's English accent is cute, and the English hosts irritate me greatly..

I realise there was a thread a few months back on the Jpods, but im fairly averse to months old necro posting.

I find the host way too annoying to listen to and he has an awful accent. Even the Japanese hosts have crappy accents in the skits because they try to imitate old men etc (and fail). I would also never pay a subscription (an expensive one at that) for a podcast. You can't even access what used to be free anymore!

The podcasts are filled with tons of deadtime. The ones I listened to had maybe 1-2 minutes of material padded to 10 minutes with boring bantering and repeating the skits (which were slow to begin with) 5 times way too slowly (to the point where I felt like I had brain damage).

Not a fan.

wasn't planning on *cough* paying.. i was going to do the .. sign up for a free week and clear the website of everything i can find way.. i did that for the newbie stuff.

Nice brutally honest answer I can see every point too, lots of nothing.. talking about their music tastes and stuff in between dialog, i was just hoping they got better the higher level they got.

Jpod looked like it would have been nice but since my free week has ended it doesn't look like it offers much for free. Most of the seasons seem to only provide you with the first 3 lessons and that's it. I was hoping for a good i+1 approach for listening (my listening comprehension is abysmal compared to reading) but I guess I'll have to look elsewhere.

Also, the main host can be rather annoying but he grew on me. Rebbecca has a much more relaxing and enjoyable voice to listen to imo, but I never heard her often.

Higher levels have less banter by the way, but I'd check them out for yourself first.

I've ripped the jpod101 site of all the DIALOG mp3s and transcript pdfs. It is pretty easy, I used a Firefox extension with regexp support to get the files I wanted.
The dialog mp3s are the japanese dialog only, there is not a single english word nor the voice of that host. Theres no dead air, no repeating stuff slowly, no translations.. just the meat of the 10-15 minute podcasts, which is actually about 1-3 minutes
The transcript pdfs are transcripts in regular japanese (kanji+kana), kana only, romaji only and english translation.
Its about 6-7 hours of material, so I try to listen to my whole jpod101 playlist atleast once per day. (It might actually be 3-4 hours of material, not sure)
I recommend people listen to stuff this level to get the benefits of i+1, it is also a language ability confidence booster (after watching ghost in the shell, I f-ing need it! I EVEN HAD J-SUBS ON WTF?)
Comprehensible input hypothesis.

I think it's not perfect, but it's got its good points. Comprehensible input is good. The weakest point is Peter. It's not that it ticks me off that much like it does for some people, but I'd rather have a native doing the dialogs.

I listen to it from time to time. I haven't finished any of the courses, but I did parts of beginner, then lower intermediate, and now intermediate. The more it advances the more Japanese it uses; the banter shifts into Japanese, and I think I have learned and improved my listening from it.

I would say hour for hour, it is probably better than just listening to largely incomprehensible shows like AJATT.

The dialog only files are useful, but you have to get the premium subscription. You could get it for 1 month and download the whole podcast with all the past shows. Or, use Audacity to grab the dialog from the full shows.

nonpoint: That seems like a good way to make jpod usable & tolerable. I might have to try that out. I didn't know they had such sound files behind the pay barrier.

I listen to them every day for 1h30-1h45 on my commute. They are awesome and very useful. It would be even more useful if I took the time to systematically study the pdf and use the sentences from there in my SRS but unfortunately due to time constraints I rarely do it.

As for annoyances, there are a few. When you listen to the same guys over and over again it's unavoidable to find them a little annoying at times. When that happens I'll switch to some other language podcast for a little while and relax for a few days listening to koreanclass101 or chinesepod or some other language

My main annoyance with jpod101 is the dialog being repeated excruciatingly slowly even in the intermediate lessons (how bad is it seem to depend on the voice actors). This is not appropriate to the level of the lessons and painful to hear. The upper intermediate lessons are the only dialog based series that skip that part.

I can't really comment on starting from zero, I started with beginner season 2.

Jpod is really worth buying a subscription (and then a few others for some other languages )

I also downloaded all their stuff via week free account + firefox + downthemall plugin. I've been a fan for a while (before I even did RTK). For me, I enjoy the banter and discussions, it's nice that they aren't always in serious study mode. The Intermediate and Upper levels are pretty good as a lot of the English is dropped. Also, they brilliantly put the transcript as lyrics so I can conveniently check out the dialogue on the iPhone in case I missed what they said or want to check out the Kanji.

As a learning resource it might not be the best way to spend your time. As mentioned before, there's a lot of padding, and they go through the language pretty slowly. Well it's a good speed for average users but slow for someone doing rtk/ajatt/anki/etc. However, I find the podcast to be enjoyable enough to give a listen every now and then before I sleep.

Here's a tip: if you have an iPod touch/iPhone and you download the podcasts, when you listen to podcasts you can change the playback speed to 1/2X speed or 2X speed - so if something's too fast, slow it down - and if something's too slow for you, play it faster.

I first noticed this on 3.0 software, so I don't know if it was available before.

vosmiura Wrote:Here's a tip: if you have an iPod touch/iPhone and you download the podcasts, when you listen to podcasts you can change the playback speed to 1/2X speed or 2X speed - so if something's too fast, slow it down - and if something's too slow for you, play it faster.

Heh, good idea. I've set the speed to 140% on my D2, it is more like TV/movie speed now.

When I try to cut & paste from the PDFs I just get squares. Does anyone know if there's a way to c/p the proper text?

vosmiura Wrote:When I try to cut & paste from the PDFs I just get squares. Does anyone know if there's a way to c/p the proper text?

Sadly it's the way the font's are embedded in the file. I did notice they have the script in the lyrics, so perhaps just copy and paste from there instead.

Arghh the Japanesepod101 beginner lessons are soooo irritating!! Basically 10 minutes of English and about 3 minutes of Japanese, plus that annoying host constantly going:

- "はい、Peter です。。".
- "Lets break it down, nice and slow.."
- "That's real nice, right Sakura."

Pimsleur is way better as a starter product. It's 50/50 English and Japanese, full speed native dialogue, and it uses SRSs to help you remember everything. Can be a bit boring and repetitive sometimes, but I find I'm constantly learning new vocab without even realising it.

hmm... Pimsleur is well done, but from what I remember of Pimsleur, Pimsleur is very slow, very comforting, teaches what it does quite well, but it's just not very much. I think jpod101 covers more Japanese in 30 lessons than Pimsleur in a whole set.

I used Pimsleur, it was quite boring but it was a good introduction to the language.
JP101 on the other hand, is good for the dialogues and in helping your listening comprehension/learning some new vocab, but I wouldn't listen to the lessons.

The Japan Shop has a 25% off deal with JPod subscriptions. The code is THEJAPANSHOP. (Not shilling, just saying. Never pay full price if you don't have to.)

JPod has its useful parts. I don't use it as much as I used to. When I do, I usually listen to the intermediate and higher level stuff-- the stuff that's mostly in Japanese. I try to avoid English as much as possible.

Some of the survival stuff was useful for traveling-- just for knowing how to use trains, buses, and taxis. Buses, especially. That stuff was confusing at first. (Why do I need a ticket? What's with these numbers?) On top of the culture shock and the jet lag, I couldn't grok it all at once without some advance warning.

Pimsleur isn't bad. Sometimes I just listen to it in the car for something to do practice-wise. (Got it from the library.) It's dull, but useful, and keeps me from shouting obscenities at the other drivers.

rich: Your AJATT-fu is weak. You should be shouting Japanese obscenities at other drivers all the time.

I found that the best to listen are the audio blogs, from #71 on. Beggining on that audio blog, there is a comment by Yuuichi-sensei and Kiyoko-sensei included. Really nice to hear real Japanese comment about the audio blog.

http://www.japanesepod101.com/index.php?p=895&cat=8

Now that JPod101 is encroaching on Chinese, perhaps we'll see a true JapanesePod someday soon...

One can hope at least.

Jarvik7 Wrote:rich: Your AJATT-fu is weak. You should be shouting Japanese obscenities at other drivers all the time.

Good one.

I've only used Intermediate-Upper Intermediate lessons because the easier lessons are too slow and boring. The Intermediate lessons start off a good pace, but by season 2 (#36/84) it really picks up. THEY GET RID OF PETER (for the most part), English goes out the window, and the difficulty starts to climb. This is where Jpod shines.

In regards to the comments made about Pimsleur. I've gone through 79/90 lessons before going to Japan. I arrived SO very confident in my abilities, and before the day was up I felt like a complete idiot for wasting my time with Pimsleur. I couldn't understand a damn thing being said to me, and all I could say were scripted phrases.

Pimsleur in Summary:
-slow, useless dialogue (not native speed)
-no understanding of grammar (in any sense ie. passive or whatever)
-no understating of real spoken Japanese
-no ability beyond lesson scripts
-waste of time

Japanesepod101 in Summary (Intermediate-Upper Intermediate ONLY):
-Sentence Goldmine!!!

While the PDFs are unfortunately encoded in a way that prevents copy and paste, the same info is in the Premium Learning Center (paywalled part of the web site), and cut and paste works fine from there.

The audio, however, plays through some Flash plugin, and there is no straightforward way to save it off as MP3 files. The podcasts themselves are obviously available as MP3, but the things like line-by-line transcripts and vocabulary words are what I am talking about here.

Look at the HTML and Javascript. It's all there.

Still, the whole XPod101 series is a pathetically poor imitation of praxis language's approach. I used to be enamored by JP101... until I turned to ChinesePod for my mandarin studies, and now I visibly cringe every time I hear peter's voice or that horrible pre-scripted banter. I am grateful that JP101 broke whatever gentleman's agreement was in place with ChineseClass101. Praxis put out a job posting a while back for Japanese instructors, and I certainly hope there's a product in the works.

Yeah, ChinesePod is on a completely different level compared to JPod101.