lilianamata - SpanishPod Review

This is good news for Spanishpod!! I agree almost 100%.  This is certainly a very welcoming community and spanishpod is a great way to learn.  As far as the comment on the website layout, I think that there is a lot too see at first, but once you get used to the format, it's great and makes a lot of sense!

Nice! :) I see a couple of errors and out-dated information in the comparison chart, but I agree with most of what I've read in the reviews. In particular, I would like to cite two paragraphs of the SpanishPod review:

As enjoyable as this course is, its major downfall is that fact that SpanishPod offers no way for the learner to have him or herself be heard. There is plenty of opportunity to communicate in Spanish in the forum. However, as much Spanish as the learner may understand, they may not necessarily be understood after having finished the SpanishPod course.

Sadly, as much as students can get out of subscribing to SpanishPod, until something is added that will enable students to be heard by native speakers or to at least record themselves, learners using SpanishPod cannot better their pronunciation. We can only hope that this capability is added soon.

I wholeheartedly agree with these paragraphs. (To really understand the meaning of these paragraphs you'll have to read the review of Livemocha.)

Bien hecho, Spanishpod!

Hooray for our side. well done all.

in fairness Spod does offer native speaker feedback its just not in the basic subscription. In addition theres absolutely nothing to stop peope linking to their own video blogs or sound recordings to the site. very few have taken advantage of the existing skype messaging facility (or spanishpod are not publishing them) and just the other day leo appealed for some karaoke versions of spanish songs and yet (to date) nada

I seem to recall that radio lingua once tried to put a show together using users recorded samples but it didnt get off the ground due to lack of material. my own experience of night school spanish is that people are unprepared for the neccessary time commitment and are ususally rather shy which is odd when you consider that the whole point of a language is to converse with other people. I suspect the language extroverts just jump in and start speaking and dont hang around in the shallow end with us learners and the floatation aids

SpanishPod offers an exceptionally active forum

here i think they were overly kind. I know i have a distorted view of reality though my half empty glass but really? it doesnt seem exceptionally active to me as i know there are tens of thousands of silent users. if every user managed just one message a week, now "that" would be a  busy board.

Hola todos.

I have wondered that, as well, DP.  40K+ users and only about a dozen of us regularly posting anything...? Maybe a lot of I-tunes users.

Or also...

Maybe a lot of people are shy and feel afraid to make a mistake. Me...I like to jump right in and blunder away....hopefully someone lends me a hand and shows me what I'm doing wrong. I'm a "press the button and see what it does" kind of person. Hoestly, I can't understand why more people don't "press the button" here...I have found Spanishpod and the entire user forum to be very friendly, kind and helpful.

SP seems to be evolving and getting better all the time, so who knows what new things will pop in the future.

For me, as long as I'm having fun and learning too, it's all good.

Felicidades a Spanishpod!

donperigo: Of course, you are right about the possibility of feedback by native speakers at SpanishPod; I guess the review focused on the basic subscription model because the authors considered this the most attractive option.

I disagree that "there's absolutely nothing to stop people linking to their own video blogs or sound recordings to the site" (or skype messaging). You mention the thing that stops users to do this: the neccessary time commitment. It's the job of Praxis Language (not of the SpanishPod team) to reduce the necessary time commitment. (Again: it is helpful to read the review of Livemocha.)

donperigo&russ: I don't think that users are shy, at Livemocha there is about one submission of a spoken Spanish exercise per minute (and, yes, they have more users).

martinillo

sounds cool, native speakers helping their opposites learn the others language now theres an idea ;-) but all this has been said before and will be again (sorry too much bsg)

I suppose typing could be harder than speaking for a generation that learned to type in shorthand with one thumb but i cant really believe that its an obstacle to most users. having  said that, one post a minute is pretty convincing.

however, credit where its due, Spanishpod  came out top in the review. yay team

Dear users

Thanks for all the feedback. I understand that Spod lacks some features. I think our major challenge is getting people to post messages. We have over 60,000 users and sometimes you never ever see them in the site. We have had brainstorming meetings on how to get them to get involved in the community, but it is difficult to engage people when they are simply not interested.

They use the product every day but they never post messages I don´t know if its lack of time, they are shy, they use their Spanish elsewhere, etc.

I been thinking what to do. Videos, skype? remember that our team is tiny so we can not engage in a conversation with all of our users. I remember you once said u were having some meetings in skype right. How did that worked?

I am open for suggestions. I would love to have a del Taco al Tango where we call our users and record the call, the way we did with Russito. I don´t know how comfortable people would feel to be in a podcast.

Thoughts?

Lillianamata

 I think the reason that the majority of users dont get invlolved with the on site conversations is that they dont need to. you give people everything they want in the podcast and dont give them any reason to visit the site in person. its the old dilema between paying people benefits and giving them the tools they need to help themselves. from the sound of things (and i must check this out) people need to interact with the livemocha site to get their moneys worth.

I dont know if users are still skyping one another, for me, technical problems made it very frustrating on a more than 3 way conversation. random calls tended to come in at inoportune times so eventually i took my phone off the hook and lost touch. its a shame i enjoyed it very much when it worked.

donperigo: I'm well aware that you mentioned the idea here at SpanishPod before! :) But seeing it in action is quite a different story.

Liliana: You are right, the technical aspect of how users could record audio and submit is one thing (here are some tools, which I actually haven't used yet but which might be useful here in the comments section: http://vocaroo.com and http://www.voki.com ), but the more important point is probably the learners' motivation to submit written and spoken texts.

I think it works well at Livemocha for two reasons: 1) there are exercises of various degrees: as a beginner you don't have to submit an intelligent comment or question on the lesson but you are first asked to write very simple sentences, e.g. you are asked to describe some objects and the reply should be something like: "El libro está en la mesa." etc. Later there are more challenging exercises, e.g. "Describe what you are wearing". For the spoken exercises you start by simply reading texts before you actually answer questions.

2) Submissions are corrected by native speakers (who learn other languages on the same web site but correct submissions in their native language). If it works well, users get very detailled corrections, i.e. even typos are corrected.

Of course, the SpanishPod team is too small to correct (or even discuss) all errors and typos in user submissions. Thus, I think the only way is to bring native Spanish speakers to SpanishPod (e.g. from EnglishPod etc. as suggested earlier by donperigo) and offer them some incentive to comment and correct other users' submission. I'm not aware of any other suitable solution.

Liliana,

Your idea of doing a Del Taco al Tango by phone sounds like a fun idea.  Its getting over our shyness is the thing.  Maybe if we all had a beer first...

Using the song of the week, a few people could participate, whether by reciting a verse or two or speaking in spanish/english (spanglish) to interpret it.

Kikuyu

quizas podamos incorporar ambas ideas :-) con una canción de beber como

noventa y nueve botellas de cerveza en el muro
noventa y nueve botellas de cerveza
nos tomemos uno, y a nos quedarán
noventa y ocho botellas de cerveza en el muro

etc.

hasta que nadie pueda seguir a hablar español X-P

(omg i just realised where "mural" comes from)

I agree that the ability to easily record and post audio files from users would really help SP.

I did this with every exercise on Livemocha until there were no more exercises to record! I got lots of constructive feedback from native Spanish speakers who I the helped with their English.

I felt that this process really helped my Spanish pronounciation, and I stopped with Livemocha only because I exhausted the available material on that site.

If SP could come up with a similar interface it would be fantastic, because Mocha really does not have great content, but Spanish Pod does!

Saludos,

Antonio