Today, we bring you another blog post from Motoko, JapanesePod101.com lesson creator, host and Office Party Planner! Motoko will be sharing more bilingual posts on our blog, so check back often and leave a comment!

Hey everyone. Motoko here! I’d like to talk about our year-end cleaning event, called Ō-sōji(大掃除) in Japanese. Most of our staff had questions about why people in offices did cleaning themselves instead of hiring cleaning staff. But this process is very significant for the year end in Japan.

As you see from its kanji, this is the biggest cleaning season and takes place at the end of the year. It has its origin in a Shinto event called Susuharai (煤払い), in which monks and people cleaned their houses to purify them and welcome the god/kami called Toshi-gami (歳神様 or 年神様) on new year’s day. In other words, Ō-sōji was originally a ritual event. The god, Toshi-gami, is believed to bring people and also their houses happiness and luck each new year. People traditionally clean their houses together and prepare for new year’s day. They believe that if the house is dusty and dirty, the god won’t come. (Japanese gods tend to like nice and clean places!)

In order to invite happiness and luck to the office, some of us formed a group: Team Ō-sōji. We had a one-hour cleaning session in the office. To be more eco-friendly, we chose to use dusters, zōkin (雑巾), to wipe everything off. You can use one of these almost forever just by washing and squeezing it.

[photo1: Our powerful weapon: マイペット]

[photo2: Clean dusters after the cleaning ]

After the cleaning, we of course went to a meal to reward everyone for their hard work.

[photo3: Salt can be one of the good sauces. Simple is best! ]

(Nov. 2012)

Hi everyone, Peter Galante, founder of Innovative Language Learning here.

I’d like to share my 2012 Chinese language success story with you this year. On January 1st 2012, I made a resolution to learn Chinese. What was different from past years?

1. I wrote out the resolution and left it on my desk, where I looked at it each day.

2. I listened to ChineseClass101 lessons or vocabulary lists each day during commutes, on my mobile phone.

3. I set smaller goals: weekly and monthly

4. I used my ChineseClass101 lessons as the study material with my tutor

The results…from the last week in November, my two 30-minute Chinese lessons are 99.9% in Chinese.

This year I have made a significant effort towards mastering Chinese. Here are a few changes I made that drastically improved my results.

Before: A Broad Written Goal -> Master Chinese

This Year: A Measurable Goal -> Speak for 30 minutes exclusively in Chinese (about my interests)

In the past, my goal was something along the line of “Master Chinese.” A broad ambitious goal, which lacked a measurable result. This year I changed my goal from ‘Master Chinese’ to ‘Have a 30 Minutes Conversation Exclusively in Chinese with my Chinese Tutor.’

Before: Attempt to Learn with Friends and Family

This Year: Pay for a Tutor

To each his own, but paying hard earned money for lessons…well, let’s just say come class time I was focused and prepared. Family members and friends are great, but sometimes things can break down fast. There is nothing on the line, and sometimes working something new into the routine can be difficult. My wife has tried to teach me her native language time and again, but it’s hard to create to proper professional environment to really learn.

By putting my money on the line, I approached things with the mindset of someone who was determined to get value from the service. My motivation was higher and my expectations of the service were higher. In turn, I demanded more from my teacher and myself.

Before: Use Tutor’s Recommended Study Resource

This Year: Use My ChineseClass101 Course as Main Study Resource

I have a Chinese teacher/tutor. We meet for 30 minutes a week online.

Before this year, our lessons were focused around textbook conversations that lacked topics I was interested in. At the same time, I was using ChineseClass101.com as my self study resource. This resulted in a disconnect between what I was learning on my own, and what I was learning in the classroom.

At first I was hesitant to ask my teacher to use ChineseClass101.com as our new study resource. In the end, I requested that my teacher use the series I was studying at ChineseClass101.com as our main study resource for our lessons. My teacher, a real rockstar, agreed, even though this meant some extra work on her end to create teacher guides for the lessons.

She was pleasantly surprised to see the classes were formatted in a way that allowed for easy integration with our lessons. Also, she liked that the lessons were based around much more current and relevant talking points than the textbooks we had been using.

This turned out to be a big break!

Now that we were using material I was studying on my own in the lessons, an interesting thing happened. My talking time in the lessons began to increase rapidly.

Remember my goal? 30 minutes of conversation in Chinese. And not talking in Chinese, but actually having a conversation.

At the beginning of the year, my total talking time in the class was about an average of 7 minutes and most of that time was spent repeating, drilling, or reading text. Our initial conversation was around a minute, and consisted of “how was your weekend?” My standard response, “Fine. And you?” And well, you get the rest.

Before: Reactively Answer Teacher Questions

This year: Proactively Control the Conversation

Now that I knew the study material (ChineseClass101.com) and was actively studying it before the lessons, I could write and practice conversations based around the vocabulary and grammar points of the lessons.

Our warm-up conversations soon shifted from the teacher asking about my weekend to conversations about relevant and current topics. To illustrate, we had a lesson about interviews and resumes. The warm conversation centered on how LinkedIn has become an important part of the employment process. This topic seems a bit difficult, right?

Well, it really wasn’t. It took a little bit of effort on my part to find out how to say LinkedIn. And that was it. A lot of the grammar was already there.

“LinkedIn is better than a resume. I don’t use resumes. I use LinkedIn. Do you know about LinkedIn?” etc.

And while I was speaking, a funny thing happened. My teacher listened with interest and began to ask me questions about LinkedIn. We then spoke about the Chinese equivalent!

When the conversation concluded, I looked at my watch. 8 minutes. It was by far the longest conversation we had ever had. And almost 1/3 toward my goal!

Now, was the conversation smooth and flowing at a native level? No. But it was 98% in Chinese. My teacher is very good in that if I say something in English, she’ll repeat back in Chinese and rarely if ever use English.

With this big win under my belt, I revisited my goal.

Before: 30 Minutes of Conversation in Chinese

This April: 10-Minute Conversation in Chinese

 Smaller Goals were instrumental. After reaching 8 minutes in Chinese, I set the next goal to 10 minutes. I would put in the necessary work before our Skype lesson to ensure I could meet the minimum time goal for having a conversation in Chinese. And again, an interesting thing happened. I would constantly exceed my goals when I studied and prepared. Of course, I would fall short when I couldn’t find the time. This reinforced how critical preparing was to my success. And the more I succeeded, the more time I would put in.

The goals progressed monthly as follows: 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 25 minutes and finally 30 minutes.

I reached the 30 minute goal was reached in November. And we were a LONG way from weekend activities. The conversation included the following topics: personal finance, credit card point systems, exchange rates, and taxes!

Before: Talking About Topics in Books

This November: Talking About Topics I’m Interested In

So why would anyone want to talk about taxes in two languages? Good question. That is definitely a topic for a different post, but I’d like to emphasize the point that we were talking about things that interested me. As my Chinese skills progressed and our conversations became longer, I found myself wanting and trying to talk about my personal interests. This was very challenging at first. In the end, I spent some time compiling lists of words related to my interests. This was a big step. I was now using Chinese as a tool to learn about things that were very interesting to me! My teacher actually had limited knowledge on some topics and would often have to research things. I think she may have enjoyed learning about these things too. Although, I’m not quite sure about that.

The lesson: it’s important to learn to speak about your areas of interest and expertise in your target language. After all, it’s what you know and live and breath everyday. Conversing in an educated manner in another language is quite an interesting feeling! And quite a LONG way from commenting on flavor of foods! It’s motivational and invigorating, and inspires the quest for more knowledge and longer conversation goals.

This is just my own personal story on learning Mandarin Chinese. I hope it helps you to regroup to tackle whatever language you’re interested in learning next year. And please, if you yourself  have a language success story, share it in the comments below to help boost our community!

 To your fluency,

Peter Galante, Founder

InnovativeLanguage.com

Today, we bring you another blog post from Motoko, JapanesePod101.com lesson creator, host and Office Party Planner! Motoko will be sharing more bilingual posts on our blog, so check back often and leave a comment!

Hey everyone. Motoko here!

Today I would like to talk about our recent visit from Innovative Language’s Co-Founder, Eran. Though he’s usually based in New York, he came to visit the Tokyo office in mid-November. It had been a year since his previous visit, so we welcomed him and took him to some interesting spots!

The first event was dinner at Ninja Akasaka. I’m sure you know what a ninja is! And this is a restaurant where you can see modern-day ninja and enjoy creative, gourmet meals. When we arrived, we were let in to the restaurant in groups of 4 or 5 people. What we saw as we entered is a secret, but it was definitely a fun and exciting experience! After being welcomed in, ninja or kunoichi (female ninja) took us to our tables. The seating areas looked like caves and we squished into our small but comfortable seats.

Every meal both looked and tasted great! The course started with a terrine of foie gras with Shuriken-shaped biscuits.

Most of the dishes related somehow to ninja and were fun to look at and eat. I really liked the tiny ninja-shaped dessert, because it was pretty cute!

If you like the animes Naruto or Nintama Rantaro, or even if you don’t really like ninja, I recommend a visit to this restaurant because you will experience something special!

(Nov. 2012)

Today, we bring you another blog post from Motoko, JapanesePod101.com lesson creator, host and Office Party Planner! Motoko will be sharing more bilingual posts on our blog, so check back often and leave a comment!

Hi everyone, Motoko here!

Today, I’d like to let you all know what we did for Halloween here in the office. Unfortunately, Halloween has not been popular in Japan in the past, but it has been getting more and more popular recently. The most famous event would be the Halloween parade in Kawasaki, as well as some other costume parties in nightclubs in the city. People usually wear a costume and become their favorite characters, and can enjoy dancing and eating. Few people go to the neighbors and say “Trick or Treat!” like people in the US do – this is because many people still don’t know what Halloween is here.

Since most of our team is from other countries, we decorated the office with Halloween stuff. Getting into the spirit, our boss Peter took the initiative with the decorations. We also had another drawing competition, like we have for other occasions in the past. Our team members drew their own jack-o’-lanterns and then put them to a vote on the 31st. We had 2 in the first place. One is the ‘abstract’ interpretation on the top left (G) and the other one has big sparkly cute eyes (I).

Which one do you like the most? What kind of jack-o’-lantern would you draw?

Extra photo: Our new motto is “no sick days”! We work ourselves to the bone!

(2012 Nov.)

Let’s play a game of Would You Rather?

Would you rather have this…
Over 300 language learning CDs (yeah, CDs…remember those?) piled to the ceiling in your bedroom next to stacks upon stacks of expensive, outdated textbooks that teach you dry, humorless conversation.

…or this?
The same amount of language learning content, shrunken down to fit onto your smartphone or tablet. And all those lessons? They’ve been updated to teach you vocabulary, grammar and culture so that learning language is actually fun!

The answer is clear. You’d rather have Innovative Language Mobile!

The biggest language course.
All on your tiny mobile device.

Introducing Innovative Language Mobile Beta!
Take all of your favorite language lessons and lesson notes on the go, anywhere you have a WiFi or 3G/4G connection, anytime and on any device. That’s thousands upon thousands of language lessons from our 27 language sites, available at the touch of a finger. Optimized for any screen, you’ll navigate through our rich collection of lessons and resources easily and intuitively.

No more zooming. No more squinting. This is language learning on-the-go!

Exclusive New Feature for 12-month and 24-month Premium Subscribers!
Whether you’re an iOS or Android user, Beginner or Advanced speaker, you can swipe your way to fluency as you go from lesson to lesson. Accessed through your device’s browser, once you log in and your 12-month or 24-month Premium membership has been authenticated, you’ll gain access to our entire lesson library including audio, video, lesson notes, line-by-line transcripts and vocabulary with audio.

Loading that many lessons onto your Phone would take up 20GB at least! With Innovative Language Mobile, you get all the content without giving up all that storage space. Save that extra space for more Instagram photos of your delicious lunch!

(taken from Mobile.JapanesePod101.com) 

Log On to Tune In
Using any WiFi-enabled device, log in to any of our 27 sites by typing in “http://mobile” before the site name. For example, JapanesePod101 Mobile can be accessed at http://mobile.JapanesePod101.com. Once logged in, tap on “Browse” to scroll through all seasons and lessons by difficulty. If you’d like to continue where you’ve left off, tap on “History.”

Most Lessons come with 3 Audio Tracks:

Plus, you get Lesson Notes and Supplementary Resources:

Innovative Language Mobile is currently available across all 27 language sites to 12-month and 24-month Premium and Premium Plus subscribers only.

If you have questions or feedback for us, send us a message here.

Today, we bring you another blog post from Motoko, JapanesePod101.com lesson creator, host and Office Party Planner! Motoko will be sharing more bilingual posts on our blog, so check back often and leave a comment!

Hi everyone, Motoko here!

In the beginning of summer this year, the Innovative Language staff went on a day trip. Today I’d like to talk about that. We chose peach-picking for fun, and soba-making so that everyone could try a traditional Japanese food! We made soba in a wonderful nihon-kaoku, a traditional type of Japanese house.

Do you know what soba is? Soba is a famous type of noodle in Japan that is a greyish-brown color. It gets this color from a special type of flour called sobako that is used to make it. You dip the boiled soba into a dip called tsuyu made from fish broth, and eat it. Adding onions and wasabi to the tsuyu give it a more grown-up flavor. Soba comes in two types: cold zarusoba, and warm kakesoba, but this time we had zarusoba.

Soba is made from sobako and flour. First, you mix the two types of flour into a large bowl called a hachi. You can use chopsticks, but it seems like it’s more common to use your hands. Next, you add water. Then comes the hard part – you have to then knead the soba dough a lot. The teacher made it look easy, but it requires a lot of strength since the dough is not that soft. Apparently, the action of kneading the dough is an important step to making delicious soba. Once you’re done kneading, you flatten the dough with a rolling pin. Then, you place the soba on a wooden board called a komaita, and cut it with a special knife called a bocho. If you cut it thinly, you get great soba. If you cut it thickly, you get soba that looks like udon. (Which still tastes good…it just might be a little hard.)

Everyone worked hard at making soba, getting themselves covered with flour in the process. After making it, we boiled it and ate it ourselves. Because the noodles are raw, they take only a minute and a half to cook. Soon after boiling them, you do what’s called shimeru in Japanese. Shimeru refers to rinsing the noodles with cold water so that they don’t get too soft. When you do this, it gives the noodles a nice chewy texture. This isn’t done with Italian pasta!

Then we got on the bus to go peach-picking. Is it common to go fruit-picking in your country? In Japan, there are a lot of opportunities for fruit-picking that change with the seasons. Cherry-picking, peach-picking, grape-picking, and pear-picking are some of the well-known ones. You go to the field to pick and eat a lot – depending on the place, there may be a limit to how much you can eat. The place we went had an all-you-can-eat deal that lasted for 40 minutes. For 40 minutes, you can pick and eat as much as you want. Apparently, the good peaches are at the ends of the branches, so everyone tried hard to get the highest ones.

The person who ate the most was a family member of one our Innovative Language staff. They ate seven peaches in 40 minutes! As for me, I ate three. The peaches I chose were big, so even after just three, I was really full!

Readers, you should definitely try your hand at making Japanese food – not just eating it. I had never made soba before, and I’m Japanese! It’s sure to be a memorable experience.

Hello Listener,

Learning a word a day is effortless, free, and takes less than a minute!

So it’s no wonder the Word of The Day at InnovativeLanguage.com is one of our users’ most loved free features. And when our users started mailing in with feedback, we just couldn’t leave it alone.

The biggest issue? iOS incompatibility. The original Word of the Day Flash Widget didn’t work with the iPhone or the iPad.

After much tinkering, the new Word of the Day Widget is here.

Access the Word of the Day widget on any browser, from any smartphone, or computer. Want to save a word or sample sentences for your own use? Just copy and paste it directly from the widget!

Add the widget to your blog or website!

Choose from 38 languages and customize the widget as you see fit! The Word of the Day widget comes in two sizes, small (160 x 190px) and large (540 x 450px) and 8 different designs. Once you’ve chosen the language, size, and design, grab the embed code and add it to your site!

If you have questions or feedback for us, send us an email here.

Click Here to Visit the New Word of the Day Widget!

Today, we bring you another blog post from Motoko, JapanesePod101.com lesson creator, host and Office Party Planner! Motoko will be sharing more bilingual posts on our blog, so check back often and leave a comment!

Hi all, Motoko here.

Today I’d like to tell you about the baseball game the Innovative Language team went to at the end of September. But before I do, which sports are popular in your country? And do you know which sports are popular in Japan?

The answer is: soccer and baseball.

Soccer came to Japan because it was popular in Europe. Baseball, on the other hand, can be written in kanji (野球), and that’s because it was introduced to Japan much earlier than soccer was. In fact, it came to Japan in 1872. It is said that it started when an American man taught some Japanese college students how to play baseball.

Of course, playing baseball is quite popular, but also people young and old love watching it. Stadium tickets come in two types; one is “reserved seating” where you can choose where you’d like to sit ahead of time. Another is “non-reserved seating”, where you can choose where to sit on game day. The second kind is cheaper. Spectators drink beer, eat snacks, and watch the game. Throughout the game, staff (mostly ladies) carry beer tanks through the crowd, so you can easily get more beer without leaving your seat!

The game was held at Meiji Jingu stadium, which is close to Shibuya. The seating areas are divided among the two teams. In this stadium, the seats on the first-base side were for Yakult Swallows supporters, and the seats on the third-base side were for the opponent’s (Chunichi Dragons), supporters. So, if you’re cheering for the Swallows, you need to have a seat on the first-base side.

Speaking of cheering for the teams, we found some unique supporters’ gear to help us do just that. Some people had pairs of miniature plastic megaphones and made loud noises by beating them together. Other people had little umbrellas and danced with the cheering groups. Each baseball team has their own mascot. Tsubakuro is the mascot of the Yakult Swallows – “swallow” is tsubame in Japanese. Actually, the first baseball team ever to have a mascot was from Japan. Did you know that?

(Sep, 2012)

Today, we bring you another blog post from Motoko, JapanesePod101.com lesson creator, host and Office Party Planner! Motoko will be sharing more bilingual posts on our blog, so check back often and leave a comment!

Hi everyone, Motoko here!

Today I’d like to tell you about another listener meetup we had.

The other day, we had two JapanesePod101.com listeners come to visit us. One was from Canada, and the other was from France. It was the second meetup for me, but I still felt nervous beforehand!

Andre from Canada, and Becher from France paid us a visit.

They met each other through their Japanese studies, and this was their first trip together – they were staying in Japan for two weeks. They told us that right before they came to the office, they had been shopping around in Akihabara, and also mentioned that they had visited Kobe, Kyoto, Osaka, and had even climbed Mt. Fuji! I’ve never climbed Mt. Fuji, by the way. I was surprised to learn that they had gotten around to it before me!

They were both very friendly, and seemed excited about coming to Japan as well as visiting the Innovative Language office. Our office is not that big, and we have a small recording booth in the corner of the room. They seemed surprised at how compact it all was.

They also mentioned how hot Japan still was even though it was September. September is the first month of fall, but it’s still quite hot in Tokyo. There were even some days where the temperature reached 30 degrees – it might be an effect of global warming.

Andre said that he would make sure that his next trip was in winter. Not a bad idea!

The Innovative Language staff will be waiting for you the next time you come to Japan!（Sep, 2012）

Another Fall has come and gone and just like that, another iPhone model has hit the market, along with iOS updates for all. If you’ve updated your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to iOS 6 already and tried looking for your favorite InnovativeLanguage.com podcast, you may be scratching your head wondering if we’ve packed our bags and closed up shop.

We haven’t.

In fact, we continue to release new lessons every single week in over 25 languages!

Here are some tips on where to find us and listen on-the-go!*

Using the Podcast App
To find these apps using iOS 6, you’ll need to download Apple’s Podcast app. (Here’s a quick link to the free download.) Once you have the Podcast app installed, you’ll be able to find us under Education or by searching for us. With one tap of a finger, you can download our latest lessons and subscribe to our feed. Once you’re subscribed, these podcast feeds will be added to your library in the Podcast App.

The app itself is made with podcast users in mind. Jump forward and backwards by 10 and 30 second intervals (great for when you want to jump right to the grammar or go back to review the vocabulary) and share your favorite lessons through Twitter, Message and email. The recent update of the Podcast app also allows you to keep your podcast library up-to-date across devices using iCloud.

Using iTunes to Sync
If you prefer using the built-in Music app on your iPhone or iPad, you can still access your podcasts by syncing with iTunes on your computer. Just be sure to delete or not download the Podcast App and know that you won’t be able to download new lessons from your device. (Unfortunately, that’s only possible through the Podcast app.) Using the Music app, you can still tap to view our lesson dialogue and create your own playlists.

No matter how you choose to listen to our lessons, be sure to sign up for a Free Lifetime Account at any of our language sites to access 7 days of free Premium access and free tools like the Japanese Word of the Day, Core 100 Words List and more!

Click for your free account now!

*These tips are up to date as of October 10th, 2012