¿Nos puedes enseñar cómo cocinar tamales picantes y calientes mexicanos? Me gusta mucho la manera que tu nos enseñas en la cocina de Liliana y entonces sirves la comida al equipo de Spanishpod.  

     Saludos,

             David

Beloved Great Chef of the kitchen Tabasco?

     Can you teach us how to make spicy and hot Mexican tamales?  I love the way you teach us in Liliana's kitchen and then serve the food to the Spanishpod Team.

    Fond greetings,

                     David

"¡Clase de cocinar muy agreable!"

JP, I hope you do come back to Spanishpod.com for a visit, and can we now call you "Pito" along with Liliana?

Every so often I go to sleep listening to Spanishpod.com lessons, which gets Spanish going into my unconscious (I'm one of those psychologists, you know).  So a couple of days ago, I had the Spanishpod.com lesson going as I fell asleep and JP appeared in my dream and said, "David, you don't have to be so concerned about your question of pronouncing "v" and "b" consonants in Spanish.  Just think of the 'irregular verbs" in Spanish, French, and irregular pronunciations of English words, such as "through". 

Later, the thought occurred to me that I only progressed from Newbie to Elementary lessons, and only studied a total of 50 or 60 of the current Team's lessons.  So I can go back and study the 340 or so lessons of the existing Team, even though we will no longer have JP and Esti. 

Señor Flynn, I thought I did mention Esti, and she is really great, funny, dramatic, and creative, and I have some very good friends who are also from Spain.  So I really value the Team having a Castilian native speaker!).

Steveooo, very well put statement about the "strong foundation" JP, Liliana, Leo, Esti, and others have already created for us. 

Thanks to JP and Esti for your wonderful teaching work for Spanishpod!  And don't think I am leaving out Liliana, Leo, and some interns and visitors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCAv285AnQc

Callum81:  I understand about your reluctance to take out a long subscription to Spanishpod.com with the news of JP's sudden and premature departure.  I was just about to pay for a Premium Subscription, when I heard this JP departure news with no one trying to convince him to stay on at least one more year. 

I think JP could be convinced to stay on, because he promised to come out with a creative way to teach grammar, and I really believe native Spanish speakers are not just sloppy pronouncers of "b" and "v" and bad spellers of words with those consonants, but that there is actually a hidden grammar of this common problem of people learning Spanish.  Leo said we often sound like "Gringos", when we students of Spanish pronounce every syllable, rather than running words together in the proper way JP imaginatively explained to us (in the Spanish elision lesson).  Some of my Spanish friends told me I am suddenly speaking Spanish much more correctly, really just after this lesson on elision from JP and Leo (with Leo's brilliantly funny joke at the end!). 

The JP and Liliana with Leo and Esti and others lesson podcasts are really unique.  There are now 400.  I think you should convince JP and Praxislanguage for JP to stay on at least one more year to reach 500 or 600.  Then Praxislanguage should sell the Newbie lessons only in bookstores around the world.  This will entice millions of people learning Spanish to buy them and want to be subscribers of all the Spanishpod.com podcasts.

1) Praxislanguage should keep JP on as a "Special Consultant".  JP could fly over 3 or 4 times a year and record special programs with Liliana and the team.

2) JP is an irreplaceable teacher of grammar and Spanish linguistics, who has been promising to come up with an innovative way to teach grammar.

JP is an irreplaceable teacher of grammar, who is a real scholar of the linguistics of Spanish (and French, Italian, etc.) and he is able to teach this most difficult and important dimension of Spanish in a humorous, enaging way that you do not realize he is doing it.  I believe it is impossible to find anyone else, who can join Liliana and Leo to do this.

3) Please offer JP a huge raise or double salary to stay on one more year!

JP is the integral leader of Spanishpod.com and Frenchpod.com, and he has unfinished business at Praxislanguage (see above), so he should be give a very large raise or a double salary to stay on one more year!

4) JP and the Spanishpod.team could be the ones to crack the mystery of the rules of pronouncing "v" and "b". 

No one has ever solved this problem and, as Leo, said in one of the lessons, native Spanish speakers "mix them up and make errors in spelling".  However, I am convinced that there is a hidden grammar to this, which JP and the Spanishpod team could discover and teach to us and publish on it.  William Labov from Columbia University in New York City is a pioneer in social linguistics, who recorded interviews with African American inner city gang leaders.  He then discovered they had a grammar of their own "Non-Standard English".  None of the learning Spanish books help you on the "v" and "b" pronounciation as much as the lesson on this from Spanishpod.com "Large b and Small b", etc.  However, I am sure if you make lists of common repeated pronunication patterns of these two consonants, you can write the grammar of this great mystery of spoken Spanish.

5) Therefore to JP and Praxislanguage:

Please try to figure out a creative way for JP to have a huge raise to stay on for at least one more year or come back a few times as a "Special Consultant" and provide special podcasts.

     Su traducción de "Abuelita" es muy professional y muy poética!  Muchas gracias,

                                         El David (Abrams)

Interview with JP?

Of course we all love Liliana, who is so lively, intelligent, fashionable, funny and charming.  She is also a great dancer and I think she would also be a very good singer!  She should sing more in the lessons and I would like to request more lessons on the rancheros mariachi songs, such as La Bamba and Guantanamera!

But when you look at some of JP's videos at http://www.vimeo.com/1045294. you see him speaking very good Chinese and when you visit Frenchpod.com, you hear him doing lively dialogues in blingual French with a Frenchman as quick-witted, funny and brilliantly pedagogical as he does at Spanishpod.com!  So do not let his casual flannel shirt, t-shirt and untied shoes and disarming way of asking basic language questions fool you:  JP is an amazing talent, who seems to be working all the time in Spanish and French and who knows where else in www.praxislanguage.com from a sophisticated, modern approach to language learning, which really gets results.  Thanks to JP and Liliana, and especially to the founders of praxislanguage, who have the best language learning anywhere!

I first thought that it would be helpful not to start off each lesson with 3 readings of the dialogue at normal conversational speed.  Why?  Because I often get only some of the dialogues.  Normal speed can be very, very fast for us foreigners, and often not so clearly articulated.  So I felt the time hearing them 3 times at the beginning was wasted on me.  However, I now realize that it is a brilliant idea that you struggle to listen a few times to the opening dialogues.  Then you explain it with excellent and very clear articulation.  Finally, when you hear the dialogues 3 times at the end of the lesson, you really start to understand them!