Lesson Introduction
Lot's going on in the big podcast today! First of all, we thank Carmentheintern on her last day of work here at Studio Fiesta... we'll miss you Carmencita! We'll also talk about Lesson 400... and the publication snafu that published it early! Finally, we'll address as well as we can the topic that's been on all our listener's minds lately: the lesson schedule reduction.
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Carmentheintern
Good luck with your travels.
Adios Carmen y buenos viajes.
Gracias a spanishpod por escuchando nos comentarios.
Hasta luego carmen, good luck and have fun. drop us a line and let us know where your travels take you,
Carmen: Hasta la próxima, ¡cuídate! :) Until next time, take care.
Spanishpod team: gracias por 400 lecciones, vuestra energía y vuestro entusiasmo. ¡Que tengáis el mismo entusiasmo por el nuevo proyecto! :) Thanks for 400 lessons, your energy and your enthusiasm. (Let's hope) That you have the same enthusiasm for the new project.
Carmen, gracias...Qué tengas caminos buenos (Happy Trails to you!)
Spanishpod, gracias por todo. Me alegro de que Uds. consideren hacer más lecciónes a los niveles altos.
(I'm happy to hear that you are considering making more lessons for the more advanced levels)
Carmen, informed idealism is a fine and rare thing. Do good, have fun and keep us posted on your adventures!
Hi Carmen, it was a pleasure to meet you last time! All the best wishes in all your future endeavors!
A comment to Praxis's competitors who surely monitor these developments: I'm ready for a switch and I'm not alone. Here's your opportunity to gain many formerly loyal customers.
dibker: I guess you are right about the monitoring. This is right from my spam box:
I was very pleased to hear that those of us who wrote to express our unhappiness about the change in schedule, and especially about the increasing emphasis on newbie and elementary levels, may have made a difference. I do hope that SpanishPod will continue to give at least as much attention to the needs of more advanced Spanish learners.
I have to admit, though, that I'm still somewhat apprehensive. This Comments section has been a great asset, especially because you (the SpanishPod team) have responded frequently and helpfully to our questions and our attempts to express ourselves en español. I wonder whether you'll be able to do so once you turn your attention to your new project. (You've said that you're already at work creating new lessons ahead of time because you won't have as much time once you start on the new project.)
Still, I feel encouraged by your response to our messages of concern about the changes. I hope you're able to keep up the great work.
hi guys! thanks for the well wishes. :)
becoming part of the spanishpod family was a pleasure and honor! i'll still be hanging out on the forums! see you around!
Cyberdiva:
Since Apr 23 I've only saved 5 lessons. The last one I saved was on 5/14 (manta con mangas).
For me there already is less and less that I can use and not having saved anything in almost 2 weeks, I've already accepted the fact that I probably won't be renewing my subscription when it comes due. The amount that I can pick from is only coming slower as it is.
The stuff just seems to be getting too easy and some of it just isn't useful. The last advanced lesson (400) didnt' feel advanced to me. Also the Del Taco with los dichos. You can absorb a couple at a time and if you use them, they'll stick, but a full lesson on them is too much in my opinion as it comes off as filler. Those kinds of things need to come little by little so you can fully understand and use them in the right situations with confidence.
For the advanced stuff, I'd like to see some dialogues between Lili and Leo like they really talk with all the slang and not so much concentration on perfect pronunciation. I had a mexican friend over today and he was helping me with some work on a car...this guy doesn't hold back. He never speaks slowly to me, and he never holds back with the slang. I've got other Mexican friends and they speak the same way, they're twice as hard to understand as Lili and Leo because they're speaking the way we speak English, all jumbled together and full speed.
With Esti I like her dialogues better when she speaks normally, and not so over the top. The cuento de la lechera was nice. No offense intended Esti.
Obviously there's been a ton of really good lessons and some incredible guests on the Del Tacos that have been so valuable to listen to.
Maybe it's just really hard to maintain such a level at the advanced level. I can't imagine getting guests for Del Taco is all that easy.
But hey, if it's time to go then so be it. My time and money spent here up to this point has been hugely beneficial and a bargain to boot. I'd still recommend Spanishpod to most anyone who's studying Spanish but for me personally I'm just not getting enough out of it anymore.
As a more advanced learner, I value the upper-intermediate and the good advanced lessons very highly, and I hope they remain a strong focus of Spanishpod.
I have no trouble finding a plethora of beginning materials out in the world, but when it comes to finding good materials for more advanced learning, they are increasingly few and far between. I've continued subscribing precisely because of the advanced diaglogue and related materials that I can obtain from the podcasts.
I will remain a loyal subscriber as long as Spanishpod continues to provide what I can't find elsewhere . . . good advanced content. Otherwise I will likely drop my subscription, but still feel grateful that new learners have a solid place to turn.
Thank you all.
Ditto.
These type of lessons would REALLY be great, because this is what happens in real life, and true Advanced lessons should be along these lines.
It never fails when I'm out and about. I try to eavesdrop on people's conversations, and can't a understand a word they say. I've been in Mexico and had people say something to me I didn't understand (because of the slang) and they repeat it, but with different words, and slower. I'm soooo sick of that.
You guys would really rock if you could produce lessons as Hypersport suggests. The internet is missing content like this, and for that matter, I don't recall seeing it anywhere, in any audio course.
Please, please, please take Hypersports comment to heart and make it happen. If you do, SpanishPod will without a doubt be unique and well positioned in the market as the ONLY site that offers something of great value to Advanced students.
Gracias Carmen por las buenas lecciones!!! Y que te vaya bien!
hypersport and rodneyp-- I know what you mean about not understanding the Mexican slang, but I really wonder whether SpanishPod should move in that direction. I mean, that may be useful for people who deal mostly with Mexicans or plan to go to Mexico, but what about those of us who want to travel more broadly and whose Spanish speaking friends come from, say, El Salvador or Chile or Spain? I think a focus on Mexican speech and Mexican slang might be too narrow for many of us.
cyberdiva, An occasional foray into Mexican speech is not going to hurt anyone. In my professional opinion, Mexican Spanish is by no means so specialized that study of it will be detrimental to people who want to travel in Latin America or Spain. Quite the contrary actually; the difference between Mexican Spanish and Central American Spanish to me sounds like the difference between California English and Canadian English. Sure, you can hear the difference, but learning one is not going to hamper your experience in the other.
Similarly, I have met many people here in China who have studied English in Australia. Certainly, Australian speech is noticibly different, and the slang is often unfamiliar to me. However, their Australian experience in no way hampers their ability to communicate in English with me, an American, or my British, Indian, or Filipino friends. And in my opinion, Australian English is further from American English than Mexican Spanish is from Iberian Spanish.
Point taken cyberdiva, but my point is not about slang. It's about fact that at the Advanced levels we're being treated with kid gloves.
I've heard all sorts of Spanish speakers, Puerto-ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, etc, and when they go full out as if they were talking with a native speaker, to me it all still sounds like one huge run on sentence. When they speak, it's delivered lighting fast. There are times I don't catch one word, not one. I'm just left standing there with the deer in headlights look. I've heard other podcasts given by a tica and she spoke incredibly fast. Even at the beginner level I couldn't understand a lot of what she said, becaus of how fast she spoke. You don't hear Leo, Lili or Esti speaking like that even in the Advanced lessons. But you know what, that young lady speaks like so many other Spanish speakers do. That's what I'm talking about.
It's beyond Mexican slang or any other slang. It's really about being exposed to the way Spanish is really spoken in a variety of different situations by different people, the way they speak to each other. Hearing how the guy wearing the suit talks, the construction worker, teenagers, etc. They all speak differently, and we don't experience that.
In the Advanced lessons we talk about culture and science and a lot of interesting, but "proper" topics so to speak. That stuff has it's place, but when you're out on the street, that's not what you need. We need to hear rapid fire Spanish riddled with colloquialisms, slang and bad grammar, because that's what you're gonna hear on the streets.
The Spanish we've been learning so far is great for going to eat, going to museums all that kind of stuff. Get away from all that and hang out with regular everyday people, in regular everyday informal situations, and watch how quickly you discover how much you don't know, how much spoken Spanish you can't keep up with. I've been in enough taxi cabs, hung out in the streets and bars, and spent days at a time with no English speakers in sight to find that out the hard way. Heck, even in the office when a couple of my co-workers start talking I can't understand a lot of what they say. But when it's one-on-one we can talk, but only because they change the way they speak, the speed, the words they choose.
The Advanced lessons to date don't help us with that stuff. Maybe we need another series called conversational Spanish or something like that, but we need something, and it should be focused on real conversational Spanish, as it's spoken in the streets, from one Spanish speaker to another.
Rodneyp,
Yeah, but you know that our crew is already dragging us along in that direction. If it hadn't been for the background noise training I would have had a much harder time eavesdropping at McDonalds... ;-)
I'm just looking forward to the day when I can read Spanish like this.
This is weird, but interesting!
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
confused?
The first sentence says,
if you can read this, you have a strange mind too.
I hear ya Rodney, I'm lucky enough to get a lot of exposure to that stuff in the breakroom at work and you're right, it's a world apart.
Cobre, that's pretty cool! Yeah, I could read it no problem.
I do agree with rodneyp, its depressing to realise how far you still have to go but im unsure as to what exactly we'd be learning. I suspect that beyond a certain point its just about exposure and practice.
Time was, and not so long ago, that i couldnt understand "word one" of spanish, even when people were speaking clearly and slowly. After a couple of years of studying I now have an understanding of grammar that dwarfs the one i left school with. However, even then, dere wos uvver peepo wot finked vat i towked awl posh (swearwords deleted) so I think we need to be wary of wanting to learn how to speak badly. I would much rather come off as an overly polite englishman who talks like a textbook than a foul mouthed street urchin with attitude.
(obviously you werent proposing that rodney but i needed a good contrast :-)
fast listening practice yes but "street", not so much.having said that esti and lilli gabbling away are plenty fast enough for me at the moment.
there was an episode of familyguy on the telly last night that had an ironic scene with two non native speakers displaying an impressive command of "real" english and the "joke" was that dispite their virtual mastery of the language they seemed cute and amusing simply because they had slight residual accents and made tiny errors in delivery.
Good point, rodneyp! I've had the same frustrating experiences trying to understand spoken Spanish. I guess I'm hoping that as my understanding of well-articulated Spanish improves, I'll be able to deal better with Spanish where people drop letters, slur syllables together, and speak very fast. I'll have enough cues to pick up what they're saying, just as I had no problem reading the passages in cobre's interesting posting. But, unlike hypersport, I still find the Advanced lessons a challenge. I guess I'd like to see them continue to use well-articulated Spanish but have the as-yet-nonexistent Advanced Media lessons cover what you and hypersport are suggesting. I agree that that would be useful even to people like me who aren't yet really comfortable with the Advanced lessons. Of course, with SpanishPod cutting back to 3 lessons a week, I guess the chances of that happening are zero to none. :-(
Donperigo, that's a good question, what would we learn?
In my mind, there would be a at least few things that could happen in the advanced podcasts...
(1) Increase the speed of the spanish. There could also be guest appearances of people with varying accents in the lessons they same way we have them in Del Taco al Tango. Between the PDF's and the explanations in the lesson, we could really train our ears to better deal with rapid fire Spanish and accents.
(2) As for the Spanish itself, think about the many colloquial ways we speak English. Some examples...
If I want to tell a friend to call me back, I might say "Yo man, hit me back when you have a chance", "Hit me up when you get back to the crib", or even "Get at me later on, I'll be out and about so you can hit me whenever".
If I want to ask a friend if he has plans I might say "What have you got up for tonight?", "Do you plan on going out to kick it tonight", or "What are you getting into tonight?"
I could on forever with examples like that, and you won't find any English books or courses that teach that stuff. And I'm positive Spanish speakers have just as many colloquialisms as we do, and nobody teaches that stuff either.
I'm sure our very talented SpanishPod team could put together lessons like that all day long, and knowing that kind of stuff is going to tremendously increase your ability to understand what's being said.
It's that common everyday colloquial usage of the language that's going to take you closer to native level fluency. And traditionally that comes from simply spending time with native speakers, but there's no reason a lot of that can't be put into lessons and taught like any other aspect of Spanish. The lessons don't have to change completely, just incorporate these things into the existing format.
Besides in "Entrevistando a SpanishPod ", didn't they say SpanishPod became famous for revolutionizing the way Spanish is taught?
SpanishPod, any thoughts you'd care to share on the subject?
I do not know how hard or expensive it would be to implement but there is technology which runs server side that will slow down streaming data, see the Demo on LoMasTV.
I think that it would be very useful if the speakers spoke at a natural speed in the advanced lessons but users had the capability of listening do the dialogues on line at a reduced speed if required.
I too am frustrated with my progress. Last year in Cuernavaca Mexico, I was able to speak with my teachers but when I would of into “the wild” I had a very hard time understanding people and they had a harder time understanding me.
rodders
1) absolutely, i think all they need to do is give esti and lilli free rein and everyone will soon be screaming slow down. as i say they already leave me trailing along behind but i know that this is something that comes with time. im not ready for supercharged spanish yet. Happily, Most people take the time to speak slowly and clearly and to avoid confusing coloquialisms when speaking to non natives, people who dont are, imho, best left alone.
2. I hear what you're saying, i know where you are coming from, i like the cut of your jib etc etc. all these expressions are fun personally i go out of my way (sic) to collect them but i think that at heart, they are exclusive i.e. designed to be used by the "in crowd" and outsiders using them just sound phoney.
If i were to to say "hit me up when you get back to the crib" people here would assume i was a) trying to be funny b) quoting a film that they hadnt seen or c) having a midlife crisis. just the same as your friends would be confused if you "came out with" wheres it to then?" likewise, i imagine that, droppping in expressions from the streets of valpariso to some guys in mexico will surely only elicit puzzled looks.
I can see that its useful to know these expressions for eavesdropping or listening to the local DJ but other than working undercover i cant think of a situation where i would "need " to employ them, though perhaps i just have more modest language aquisition goals. If like hypersport you work closely and for any length of time with guys who use a lot of slang then perhaps that is when and where you pick it up. because you learn the appropriate "local" noises.
I suppose spanishpod could do even more "local colour" podcasts, id be very interested, but i dont think theyd be very "useful" in as much as if you genuinely "need" this stuff you are probably already hearing it everyday and can get the skinny straight from the horses mouth. ;-)
Mi dos centavos…
Estoy agradecido de que he aprendido mucho aquí. Empecé con 0 destrezas de español y ahora me siento bastante a gusto para tratar de hablar co n unas gentes.
Creo que el equipo aquí es excelente y trabajan muy duro.
Sé que todo este es reacción importante, pero deseo que nos pudiéremos centrarse en las lecciones y por aprendiendo español, en lugar de los negocios y la crítica. O quizás por lo menos que podríamos escribir nuestros comentarios en español.
I'm just grateful that I have learned so much here. I started with 0 Spanish skills and now I feel comfortable enough to try to talk with some people.
I think the team here is excellent and they work very hard!
I know all of this is important feedback, but I wish we could focus on the lessons and Spanish, instead of business and critique. Or maybe at least we could write our comments in Spanish.
Thank you SpanishPod team for your wonderful podcasts at all levels. I am an 'elementary' level and yet I listen to all the levels. This has increased my comprehension of spoken Spanish by such a large measure that I am functioning very well in a Spanish conversation class. Most of the other students are very impressed with my skills!
My skills in interacting with native speakers are still not good enough to support more than a very basic conversation. SpanishPod fills an enormous gap, but adding an interactive component would be a plus.
LoMasTV's media is really good, but it is not enough to build fluency. Some combination of interactive media wold IMHO be the best approach.
I could see speed as a legitimate request if your at that point where it's needed. I don't really see slang as that important were it needs to be taught, a lot of the times it's words you already know but with a different twist. Unless your Lenny and your "bref is boofin" but you can understand that with context.
Honestly I think music is a good for learning slang and getting you speed up, reggaeton with the lyrics will work. And it will save the Spanishpod team from the embarrassment of breaking down the Spanish equivalent of "Yo ma what it iz, Im sayin where u be at?" I would cringe if I heard Marco say this on Englishpod. And I think DonP said it right you would come off phoney learning it from lessons. Maybe you could find a Spanish Urban Dictionary too.
Gracias Spanishpod por todas estas 400 lecciónes. Es excelente con la lista para cada nivel. Han hecho un bueníssimo trabajo!
Hola Totos,
Just thought I'd add my dose centavos:
It’s kind’a disturbing to hear that some folks are less than thrilled with the advanced lessons. I'm at the Elementary level and I download the lessons to CD and listen while doing my morning routine or sometimes while traveling. I've recently tried a few of the Intermediate category, which seem to be quite a jump, but I see there are 77 lessons already. This is going to keep me busy for the next three years at least, so I will be renewing my subscription.
This is the best program I've ever seen, and anything I want to know that SpanishPod doesn't teach me I can get from my Spanish-speaking students or colleagues at school.
Also there is a book called to “Streets and Spanish” with a CD, and a great book called “Mierda!—the Real Spanish You Were Never Taught in School.” I have the songs by Belle Perez, who is one of my original inspirations for learning Spanish. Here in California there is Spanish TV.
it’s a great program. Now I’ve got my mother subscribing to ItalianPod, so Catherine and Marco owe you a lunch.