I use by subscription mainly for the podcasts, the same as everyone else has mentioned.  I rarely seem to find time to sit at my computer and practice the lesson using the expansion, etc.  And when I do, I often find myself irritated when there is an error.  I do like access to the site by iPhone and Study Arcade.  I love the match game.

In truth, I have been practicing my Spanish (other than the podcasts) elsewhere.  I use Skype and GTalk to have language exchanges with native speakers that I have found via other web sites.  I think this is a short-coming of this site that probably needs to be addressed if your goal is to be an all-around language-learning site.  And, maybe, this is a feature that would re-value this site to those higher-level learners who are now rightly complaining that their subscriptions have been adversely affected by the new changes.  Though, what they really want is their podcasts to, at least, remain the same.  To lose any of these higher-level subcribers would deminish the value to the rest of us.  They lead us and guide us in many ways that the team is not able to.

When deciding to renew my subscription recently, I wondered if I needed to continue my subscription with SpanishPod.  Considering that I have archived all of them in iTunes,  I don't really need to go to the web site for the archived podcasts.  But I did renew.  I couldn't see myself not getting the new podcasts, having access to the new conversations, getting Leo's cooking lessons, etc. 

The SpanishPod team is great.  I love you all.  You make me laugh.  I know that you are working to improve this site.  And you are trying to do so from the imput you have received.  Keep up the good work.

And to all of you in this conversation, thank you.  I really appreciated seeing your comments in English, so that I could understand what you were trying to say.

Saludos

thanx , i just reread my message, duh, obviously no pdf here :-)

in truth i had checked other pages and am unable to see links to pdfs

On the page that you can view ten lessons at a time, underneath each lesson player are 5 icons. The PDF icon is the second from the left.

On a lesson specific page it is located underneath the player where it says Lesson Review Downloads:

Mine is as you described for the 10-lesson page, but on the lesson-specific page, I have only four options listed, the Lesson Transcript PDF is missing. Hmmm!

I would suggest making a tool that helps users learn to speak more often.  An example would be a tool with a number of questions that the user would have to answer.  Then the user can click the "response" button, and hear what an actual response would be, and compare that with what the user originally said.  That way, the user is forced to think and answer in the language.

I tried hard, but I cannot resist: here is an example of what this could look like for translations from English to Spanish. :)

Just allow users to hide the Spanish lines in the expanion section by default. Currently this is only possible with the English lines, but dtang's suggestion shows that it makes sense to also hide the Spanish lines by default.

tungwaiyip says
2 hours ago

  I guess I can learn a lot if I feed myself telenovela everyday. But that stuff is unwatchable for me. So I'm really glad to find SpanishPod which gives me a regular and sustained interest.

Amén.

De vez me enciendo a unas de las telenovelas, pero  en cuando me escuchar a uno en inglés para más de un minuto es dificil, con el español puedo quedarme allí un poco más pero luego huir. Las noticias, a veces las películas, y spanishpod (gracias a dios o el equipo, quizás ambos.)

Amen.

I turn the telenovelas on occasionally but listening to one in English for more than a minute  is hard, with Spanish I can hang in there a few more but then I run away. The news, and sometimes movies, and spanishpod. (thank god or the crew, maybe both.)