Language-training lessons like ‘JapanesePod101’ are a growing breed and among the most popular podcasts on Apple’s iTunes service. Deciding to learn a new language on the Internet is a little like browsing the supermarket: on iTunes alone, there’s a broad selection of audio instruction that includes Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Korean and English. Unlike most traditional language classes, podcast-language training is typically fun and informal, with an emphasis on practical tips. Shows like ‘JapanesePod101’ and the pioneering ‘ChinesePod’ and ‘FrenchPodClass’ might even pose a challenge to traditional educators and publishers in the language-training field. “Podcasting brings the teacher to the students. It might sound simple, but this has major business implications,” says Ken Carroll of ‘ChinesePod,’ which is downloaded 120,000 times a week. “One talented teacher can now reach an unlimited audience with practically no distribution costs.”
Before my wife and I traveled to Japan for the summer, we took traditional classes at a San Francisco language school and listened to Galante’s ‘JapanesePod101.’ The differences were stark. In the classroom, we learned the polite and informal names for various family members, how to describe our pastimes (“My hobby is tennis and reading!”) and how to make small talk about the weather. Here in Japan we have only used a few of those expressions, and in particular we need only one word to describe the hot and humid climate— mushiatsui .
The podcasts, on the other hand, provided a great practical guide. While entertaining listeners with his infectious enthusiasm and overt fondness for his colleagues, Galante weaves instructive lessons around functional tips for navigating Japanese society. We learned what to do when we miss the last subway of the night, the names of popular celebrities and brands, words you can use when visiting an art museum and how to tell a shopkeeper what you like and don’t like. The podcast also serves as an inadvertent restaurant guide. Thanks to Galante’s genuine, unpaid testimonial, we were moved to experience the wonders of the Japanese fast-food chain Mos Burger.
So we felt a bit star-struck when we spent a morning a few weeks ago with Galante and his crew; it was like meeting your favorite radio DJ and finally attaching a face to a famous voice. Galante, 30, is just as ebullient and gracious in person as he is on his podcast. He met us in the subway and guided us through the bustling Akasaka district to the crowded, houseplant-strewn offices of the translation firm Erklaren Co., where he worked before discovering the ChinesePod lessons produced by Ken Carroll. “My wife is Chinese, and I was looking for ways to study Mandarin,” he said. “I thought it was an amazing way to study a language, and there was nothing like it in Japanese.”
Galante pitched the idea of a Japanese-language podcast to his bosses, who invested in his new endeavor and gave him office space. He now has a volunteer staff spread around the world—they can collaborate around the clock, thanks to the power of the Web—and four full-time employees in the Tokyo office, including a Norwegian student named Jonas. Galante found and hired Jonas after he began voluntarily answering listener questions on the show’s Web site.
In the past nine months, Galante’s crew have worked long hours, pulled the occasional all-nighter and taped a total of 220 shows—more than enough for the novice Japanese student to get started. “This is a labor of love,” Galante says, “I haven’t gone out with my wife on a Friday night since I started this. I have beaten my body to a pulp.”
In April, Galante followed ChinesePod in charging $8 a month for a basic subscription. The podcasts are still free, but paying listeners get access to lesson transcriptions and vocabulary words written in the Japanese alphabets. He also rolled out a $25 a month option, which offers flash cards, line-by-line readings, detailed lessons in writing and reading kanji, quizzes and other self-study tools. Five hundred listeners now pay some kind of monthly fee.
What language podcasters still lack, of course, is the ability to talk one to one with students and help them hone their conversational skills. Galante’s hope is that members of the podcasts’ active community can themselves serve that function, speaking to each other over the Net. He is looking into integrating Skype voice over Internet software into his Web site, but first has to hire more employees and settle into a rational work routine that doesn’t involve sleeping on the couch at the office.
Ken Carroll of ChinesePod is moving a bit more quickly. The longtime Shanghai-based language instructor and Dublin native recently created an online certification course for teachers and has begun to connect them with his listeners for individual study, either face to face if they live in the same city, or over Skype. He says he is exploring the possibility of charging a brokers’ fee for connecting teachers and students, and perhaps even setting up physical stores called PodCenters where his listeners can come to practice with each other.
Podcast-based language training “threatens the hell out of any business in the industry who ignores the new technologies,” Carroll e-mails from China. “We can do at least half of what the best language schools can do in a more convenient way and a fraction of the price.”
As any Japanese speaker might say when agreeing with such inexorable logic: so desu ne .
