We will make our lessons more difficult. I just need to know what would you like them to be.

Do you want them to be more grammatically challenge, or content? Or both.

A big majority of our lessons are requests from our users. If you have a theme you are interested to know, please send me your ideas. We will keep making biographical lessons.

By the way, I just wanted to let you guys know that our lessons are not scripted. After making research, writing the lessons, edit them, we spend some time breaking them down, we see where are we stopping and then after we record.

I hope you are not offended. I dont feel the lessons need to be more difficult, the difficulty is managed via the different levels, advanced upper intermediate etc However i often wish they tackled points in more depth, it can seem that you touch on a point and move quickly on because of what increasingly sounds like time constraints.

Having said that, i do understand that lengthy analysis of the grammar is not part of the praxis ethos the idea being that one learns the language by listening and using rather than analysing.

Truth be told i love nothing more than when jp makes lillli lose it and laugh with some outragious bit of eighties street patois. thats what keeps me coming back and although I understand that you cant just manufacture this stuff as required (it would sound stilted and phoney) the fact is that without it the format starts to sound stilted and mechanical.

donperigo, 80s street patois?  that's just how I tizalk, brah!

I was really frustrated last September by the new free podcast in iTunes. Nota bene: not with the subscription price but with the new format of the free podcast. I still don't like it but in the end it's none of my business. However, since I had several ideas to improve the SpanishPod web site and the free podcast, I decided to just implement those ideas myself when I learned that the licensing actually allows me to do that. Thus, I started to do that wikibook with the 40 first newbie lessons. Currently, I'm working on a page about the grammar in these lessons. The chapters of the wikibook are (or will be) also available as a podcast. It's been (and is) a fun experience and I'm learning a lot about all kinds of things including Spanish (although it requires quite some time; time which I probably would spend here in the forums otherwise). In a way, I'm putting my frustration with the SpanishPod web site into productivity, which works very well for me, and I'm really grateful that the SpanishPod team allows me to do this.

I think for Anna8 and Hypersport the Del Tango al Taco transcripts play a similar role. Reading a book together was also a good experience (and I'm sorry that it took me so long to start with Allende's book, I promise to be more involved with the next book). Thus, I guess the way to go for more advanced learners is to find appropriate activities around the SpanishPod web site which don't require the active involvement of the SpanishPod team. It might help to mention shortcomings of the web site and the lessons etc. from time to time but in the end it's the decision of the SpanishPod team how they spend their resources. The suggestion box might help with this decision.

From a business point of view, I guess we have to accept that upper intermediate and advanced users are just not as important as newbies because there are far more newbies and it takes more work to produce appropriate material for upper intermediate and advanced learners. The positive side: among some of the SpanishPod users there is a culture of looking things up in grammar books and dictionaries and then discuss them here, with or without the participation of the SpanishPod team. Hey, I just realize that we are being educated to be autonomous learners! :)

About lesson topics: I think it would be nice to have more lessons about standard situations: ordering, complaining, and paying in restaurants and bars, shopping in all kinds of places, asking for directions, etc. all the standard situations, which usually become more challenging from a grammatically point of view and also with respect to vocabulary and culture as soon as you include real Spanish and real situations. In reality it's almost never simple. The last time I stayed in a hotel in Spain I had to explain that "Martin" is my first name instead of my last name (I guess "Martin" is a common last name in Spain), I had to ask what a "habitación con vista" is (of course, it's a "vista al mar"; I don't know what I was thinking, maybe I thought of "Windows Vista" :), and I had to ask about the fee for parking the car (and that's only what I remember now). Thus, standard situations with a few twists, gramatically traps, and cultural pitfalls. That might be interesting for newbies as well as for the rest of us.

One more word to the SpanishPod team: I totally agree with hypersport, you guys are still the best. :)

Please understand that we would not even be having this conversation if you had not established such exalted standards in the first place.  Even when you're a little off your game, you're still terrific.

And thanks Donperigo, Hypersport and Martinillo for your thoughtful comments.  I know it's hard to talk about these things, but I felt that, ultimately, an open discussion would be a good thing.

Although I normally listen to all the Romancepods, I decided to focus on Spanish exclusively for several weeks before my last trip to Mexico.   Once home, I got back to my old tripod habits and was very surprised by the discrepancy between the quality of the pods.  To wit, Italianpod and Frenchpod lessons, especially at the elementary and intermediate levels, were cleverly written, carefully produced mini-theatricals with expansive discussion of grammar and vocabulary while the equivalent Spanishpod lessons had become inexplicably honed-down with, as Donperigo says above, grammar points left hanging and with, as Hypersport notes, a loss of spontaneity.  That is, Italianpod and Frenchpod were like Spanishpod used to be and Spanishpod was...not.

But wait!  It turns out that Italian and French lessons were being published only three times a weeks while Spod was hanging tough with a daily lesson.  Not only that, Spod was teaching us to cook, to dance, to laugh at grammar-- ¡guau!

So I figure that presented with budgetary constraints and hard choices, Spod chose to keep faith with the daily lesson commitment by paring back each lesson while Ipod/Fpod kept the lesson quality constant while cutting back on numbers.  Or at least that's my hypothesis...

Do I want the lessons to be more difficult?  No, that's not it.  My favorite lessons are the Seinfeldian ones, the shows about nothing, ordinary situations with a twist, dialogues based on mutual misunderstandings.  The ones that make me laugh. 

My least favorite lessons are what I think of as the encyclopedia readings, the dutiful child reporting on a Very Important Topic (although even these can be salvaged by a good discussion about the dialogue).

As I see it, the discussion about the dialogue, the metadialogue, is super-important at all levels.  I love the way you tease out a new structure or idiom, and show how it can be used in other contexts; I listen for explanations of vocabulary -- is it a regionalism?  how polite/slangy/vulgar is it? And when you go off on a tangent -- a Spanish tangent, of course -- that spontaneous conversation is often the best part of the lesson.  (Think of Lili and Esti riffing on their childhood liver-eating experiences in the advanced lesson on heart surgery.) 

For me, it's all about language, exposure to/practice with pattern, rhythm, and sound, building vocabulary.  The specific lesson topics are never an end in themselves -- or at least as I see it, they shouldn't be -- but rather a starting point for a linguistic exploration.

i know this will end up looking like a strange comment but..

where?? I dont see it, do you mean the news announcement.  IMHO it needs to be on every page or in the menu.

Id like to see a little \"contact us\" sidebar panel on every page because of the way the site is organised. Us old hands can find our way around but newbies and occasional visitors are unlikely to go looking for a panel they may not realise exists.
I think if its to engage all the users it need only ever be one click away.

Having said that i susect that the few of us who actively want to give feedback already know the routes to take.