jgrob, thanks for the kind words!

deborahthompson, I don't usually explain the subjunctive in the newbie and elementary levels; we introduced it here not for the purposes of grammatical mastery, but for the sake of listening comprehension.  The subjuntive appears a lot in the more advanced levels, and I will give an even more thorough treatment of the subjunctive in a future La clave.  :)

using any lesson like a dictating machine recording and trying to transcribe it, or part of it will sharpen your ear. 

Thanks for the advice. I'll try it myself. Lord knows I need the training in listening skills. Gracias otra vez.

J.P. ¡De Nada!

(when I did the SpanishPod test it placed me at low intermediate level)

Estoy un poco aburrida con elementary (repeated three times and broken down in exhaustive detail) yet in the intermediate and upper intermediate you skip over areas and only translate part of the dialogue....

I appreciate the hard work you put into the lessons, I have found them to be the most creative and interesting Spanish lessons around.  A lower intermediate level seems like too much to ask for, but perhaps a word for word translation of Intermediate lessons would be helpful to some of us 'lost-inbetween-level' types...

I found breaking out of elementry very hard. I already had a fair grasp of the grammar so i wasnt "learning "anything new yet i still couldnt understand all the spoken spanish.  i was always a bit baffled as to how just gradually changing the spanish english ratio was supposed to work although i will testify that one day you will magically find you can follow the intermediate conversation especially since you can relpay it to your hearts content.

I suspect a comprehensive breakdown of the intermediate dialogue would just slow things down without offering much immediate benefit ie there'd be an awful lot of reviewing stuff you already know . At this level, we have a million questions but  i think if we try to tackle all of them at once we will grind to a halt. hopefully as we work through the many lessons we will find we have fewer questions each time. for me the real gold in these lessons is lilliana talking at speed it is the immersion practice we all need.

what I think would be useful would be to have intermediate lessons that are built around the same subject, vocab and grammar (including the expansion stuff ) as covered in the elementry lessons e.g. "seatbelt 2 now with extra spanish" that way you would already have a head start which would help you feel a bit more secure, it would both reenforce and reward your elementry studies . having to learn all new stuffas well as coping with all that extra spanish can be a bit overwhelming at first.

additionally, perhaps they could  beef up the elementry level a bit as its often indistinguishable from newbie i.e. just repeat the dialogue twice to give more time for additional examples and grammar discussion

Cuando empecé a escuchar SpanishPod, sólo escuchaba las lecciones avanzadas y "intermedias altas" pero ahora escucha todas las lecciones porque son maravillas y siempre se puede aprender algo nuevo.  Es obvio que el equipo SpanishPod piensa mucho en la estructura de sus lecciones.  Todos merecen mucho éxito en el mercado de aprendizaje de lenguas porque es un producto sin igual.

SpanishPod es una herramienta muy buena de usar, no obstante, a mi modo de ver,  es necesario que uno lea, escuche, escriba y hable el idioma mucho para alcanzar los "niveles" más altos. 

donperigo, tú tienes una actitud muy buena porque siempre estás llevando a cabo tus propios "proyectos" en los foros y, en mi opinión, te ayuda mucho.

Estos lecciones me han ayuda mucho con la comprension, y ahora encuentro que entender mas con cada leccion..... 

i listen once to the intermediate to advanced dialogue and then read while listening the second time and that makes it all come together.....

i just think that they could beef up those lessons a bit (they are often only 6-7 minutes)

!mas informacion es buena! 

All the bilingual people I know say that "vamos" is the word used, and have never heard "venga" used in this context, as in, "¡Vamos, aranca el coche!"

Is this usage of the word regional?