As you may have noticed the blog has not been updated last week nor will it be updated this week. (Unless you count this as a blog entry.)

I wanted to tell everyone what has been going on so you have a better understanding of the situation.

Last month, I was laid-off from my full time job and now I am using all my free time searching for a new source of income. This is why I have had no time to update the blog with tips for studying Japanese.

Do not worry, once everything gets settled and I can get back on my feet, I will be able to regularly update the blog once again.

I will keep you all posted on when the blog will be updated again. I hope to have a blog entry in time for next week.

Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience but I thank you for your support and understanding.

In the meantime, you can still check out our facebook page for daily word-of-the-day plus example sentences. Check us out today at: http://www.facebook.com/tjlpodcast

See you soon! And keep studying!

First off, for those of you who are reading this entry; a big arigatou goes out to all of you.

Thank you for your continued support even if we have not been online for sometime.

With that being said, we have decided to revive the blog so that we can keep you up to date with what is going on in the world of Japanese language learning.

I am sure a number of you are wondering what happened to the podcast. Without going into too much detail into people’s personal lives; we have found it quite difficult to get our guests together for a recording because we all live quite far from each other.

I really hope that in the near future we can get the podcast back up and running. We are looking at some solutions for this and kindly ask that everyone be patient.

My goals are to update this quite frequently as I have started studying Japanese again in full force and have learned some new techniques that may be useful for others. So, please keep an eye out.

If anyone also has any questions or suggestions on what they would expect from our blog, please do not hesitate to leave your comments.

Let’s get learning!

I apologize for the lack of new episodes. At this time, I am putting all of my energy and effort into finding new employment, which has left me little time for producing episodes. I can’t make any promises as to when we’ll be back but I hope that it will be very soon.

If you’re going to Anime North next weekend, drop by our panel and say hi!

Mike Nicolas from The Anime Roundtable (the official podcast of Anime North) will also be joining us.  Of course, we’ll be giving our own podcasting tips and tricks and taking questions from the audience.  If you’ve ever thought of starting up your own podcast, you don’t want to miss this!

JapanSoc is a social bookmarking site for Japan-related blogs and news. So when you “Soc” one of our posts, you’re helping to spread us to a wider audience of Japan lovers. Selected posts will display the “Soc It!” button that you see on this post. Click on it and you’ll be taken to JapanSoc.com where you can log in and submit the link.

We’ve also added a link to the RSS feed entries to make it easier for you to share the love even if you’re only following us in your news reader.

Kimberly will be writing posts for The Japanese Learner blog on learning Japanese that should serve as an excellent supplement to the discussions we have on the show.  As soon as I can manage it, I’ll be joining her and together we will make this blog worth a space in your RSS reader!  =)

You can subscribe to the blog using this feed.

At some point, my iTunes feed started broadcasting this address as the podcast feed URL.  This is the full blog feed served through Feedburner.  There’s also an episodes-only feed being served through Feedburner, which is here.  The latter URL is the one that podcast subscribers should actually be using and it currently has all episodes in it. I’m not sure when the switch happened but I think I’ve fixed it now.

If you’ve just subscribed to the show recently via iTunes, please update the podcast or, if that doesn’t work, delete the podcast and resubscribe.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

The only thing that Powerpress is missing is a widget for the sidebar to display buttons for subscribing to the podcast by RSS and through iTunes.  I’ll have to either code my own widget or hard-code the buttons into my WordPress theme.

Here are the subscription links again.  Feel free to use these until I can get the sidebar fixed:
Subscribe by RSS (in your favourite non-iTunes podcatcher)
Subscribe through the iTunes Music Store

I haven’t blogged about the trip.  I didn’t want to spend more time writing about it than enjoying it.  But, there will be a special episode related to my travels.  Please look forward to it.

This weekend is a holiday weekend in Canada — Thanksgiving weekend to be exact.  So, of course, recording of any episodes is delayed until at least next week.

Please send us your feedback on the episodes up to this point and if there’s anything you’d like us to cover on the show, let us know.  As always, thank you all for listening!  =)

Episode 4 is a bit late but I will be attempting to post it from my hotel room in Tokyo once I’ve settled in.

I should have some interesting stories to tell when I get back. And of course, lots of pictures. I look forward to resuming production of the podcast when I come back with episode 5, “Getting Started with Kanji”.

Thanks for listening, everyone! And I’m off to the airport!