If you’ve been poking around the web sniffing for Japanese-language studying help, odds are you’ve seen ads for japanesepod101.com (caution, annoying auto-play video on that link) learning podcasts.

I’d seen them for quite a while myself and never bothered checking them out much, but recently I decided to take a basic subscription.  This is a lot cheaper than the premium subscription, at only $8/month (less in larger chunks).  The main reason for this was that I can listen to music or whatever I like all day at work and for the most part it doesn’t interfere with what I do.  (I can’t concentrate on two text streams at once, at all.  So if I’m writing something I have to turn it off.  But mostly what I do doesn’t require thinking in words.)  So I thought, well, if I have all this time it hardly makes sense to let it go to waste.

I probably won’t resubscribe after the three months are up, because they have a heap of archives.  I downloaded them all.  Now I have over three continuous days of lessons just in the “beginner” category, which I’m going through now – I started on “lower intermediate” and did learn a fair bit, but that was mostly a tad advanced.  A lot of the beginner lessons on the other hand are too low-level, but I do pick up one or two things most lessons and after all the time is free.  Most days I listen for four to six hours.

I know a lot of people would make an argument that simply listening to native source material would be more productive, but, I don’t know, I still like having things explained.  Especially with grammar points, I find that one simple explanation can be worth a very long time of attempting to learn it by osmosis.  And of course I do still have a lot of immersion-style input.