I used to watch the old videos about two or three years ago that Yuki would do and really liked her usage of drawings.
Recently she has been doing the series with the illustrated story Pepper and Carrot and I have found the combination of the images and her commentary to make it very comprehensible and helpful for me to make that intermediate jump.
I like several of the teachers style of videos but besides Yuki, Chieko has been the one that I have found to be the most comprehensible and the most detailed in her videos and topics, she will do a 15 minute video on some aspect of Japanese culture I have never heard of before and I will find myself understanding a majority of it.
Her combination of visuals with her commentary and vocal tonality make it incredible learning experience.
I would like to see more videos with illustrated novels or manga like Yotsubato or Yuru Camp which would give ample opportunity to describe the images and have simple enough dialogue that we could understand a majority of the content.
I am mostly listening old to new, so I havenāt seen any of the new teachers yet. I think I like the describe a picture videos the best so far (which are very similar to the one Pepper and Carrot video I have seen). If feels practical in that I can pause and try to describe things and see how it lines up. They are very challenging on relisten as audio only.
The quiz/guessing videos do this as well.
It seems like all of the videos I have seen use keigo (masu/desu). I think it would be helpful to have some plain Japanese videos.
Slightly off topic, but relevantā¦
I suspect Pepper and Carrot was chosen because it uses a permissive creative commons copyright. Thatās the same reason the Give my Regards to Black Jack manga is used various places. Under the DMCA, I think including random excerpts of a couple of pages in a 7-13min video would be permissible as educational. But Japanese law might not make that allowance.
I havenāt seen many videos on this website yet, but my favourite videos so far have been the Letās Play/Gameplay series for Stardew Valley. I admittedly donāt have the best attention span, but I was able to watch EP 1 the other day despite it being 34 minutes without getting bored at all. I think itās because the game is so chill and Yukiās always doing something in the game so my mind doesnāt really wander while watching.
I personally would be interested if the teachers could do random street interviews with people, but I guess that would be difficult because they would need to ask the participants to use simple Japanese depending on the difficulty level.