Other names JPod, JapanesePod Language(s) English; Japanese | Country Japan | |
Genre Educational; language course; cultural instruction Running time 10–20 minutes (average) Starring Peter Galante
Naomi Kambe
Natsuko Kawamoto
Sakura Suzuki
Yuichi Suzuki
Jessi Nuss
Kat Crosbie
Motoko Obata
and many other personalities | ||
JapanesePod101.com is a language course podcast and accompanying website that offers lessons in Japanese. The service was founded in 2005.
Contents
Overview
Created by Peter Galante in 2005, JapanesePod101.com provides audio and video lessons with accompanying text expansion exercises and other extensive tutoring aids available to paid subscribers or "premium subscribers". It is a product of Innovative Language Learning and is produced in Tokyo, Japan.
Company
JapanesePod101.com's parent company Innovative Language Learning LLC is based in New York, though day-to-day operations and recordings occur in their Tokyo offices. As of December 2016, Innovative Language Learning operates sites and creates content for 34 languages.
Content
Lessons on JapanesePod101.com come in both audio and video variants, and range in difficulty from absolute beginner to advanced. Paid subscribers also gain access to lesson materials, such as transcriptions, vocabulary lists, and lesson notes.
The learning center hosts a number of other features for paid subscribers such as dictionaries, a flash card system, and curated lesson collections. In 2014 the company began offering new subscription tiers for personalized tutoring and 1-on-1 Japanese lessons over Skype.
By 2006, the website averaged more than 8,000 downloads of its content per day according to The Japan Times, and has been noted in Newsweek. By September 2015, the company's lessons have been delivered 500,000,000 times across its various languages.
In addition to the lessons and learning resources, the website also has a blog, which hosted a series of articles about Japanese characters by writer Eve Kushner. The series concluded in April 2010.
Controversy
The service has garnered some controversy due to their aggressive marketing tactics and vaguely worded "Free Lifetime Account." In actuality, the Free Lifetime Account only gives access to the entire site (the equivalent of a "Premium" subscription) for seven days, at which point access is limited to the first three lessons of each series and the most recently published lessons.
Users have also reported confusion over the pricing, unexpectedly paying for a 24-Month subscription when intending to pay month-to-month. This confusion is due to the subscription cost decreasing as the amount of months bought at a time increases. The actual cost of subscriptions as of December 2016 is as follows.
Several users have expressed anger over a $1 deal presented as a one-time charge that automatically opts-in to a recurring monthly charge.