Lenguajero Blog

August and I got a puppy. Her name is Pasa (Raisin in Spanish), or for now, Pasita. Pasa has a lot of energy and por eso I’ve been walking her a lot. This has given me a lot of time to listen to new music and podcasts that I don’t normally listen to. One thing that has come out of this is that I am now listening to a LOT of new Spanish language music.

My new discoveries started with this Writing Club theme – write about your favorite song, which has been one of our most popular topics ever (for good reason).  Since then I have discovered a bunch of great resources that I would recommend to anyone else interested in finding great Spanish language music.

1. I signed up (and actually paid) for a couple of months on LoMasTv. LoMasTv is a site that has videos in Spanish (like telenovelas, music videos etc.) that you can watch. The player that you watch the videos on has Spanish and English captions (that you can turn on or off) and pitch-correct slow play (especially useful when you’re listening to Calle 13). While you’re listening you can add new words to a flashcard program in one-click.

There are 2 other things I think LoMasTv does really well. First, the music available is popular and crosses every genre. It’s organized by Spanish-difficulty and/or country. There is a tongue-in-cheek write-up about each song/artist. The other is that there are Spanish lessons on grammar, expressions or vocabulary that reference specific songs. Here is a lesson on the suffix -ero (it helps explain our name – lenguajero no?), that uses Choc Quib Town to reinforce the lesson. This is an awesome way to learn Spanish.

2. I discovered another great site Radio Tuna.

It’s a beautiful site that helps you find free streaming online radio stations. Just click on genre “Latin” and you’ll see un montón of Spanish music. Another neat thing about the site is that for each song you can see information about the artist. So if a song by Las Orishas comes on, I can see right there on the site their entire bio and a list of their albums.

3. I really like the YouTube stream for Buenos Entonces. One morning I played their video of Gotas de Agua Dulce by Juanes about 20 times in a row. I’m sure my neighbors loved me.

4. @Verschof from the language-learning blog Baby-Steps to Fluency tells me that Pandora is great for discovering new music. Her advice is to start with a spanish-language artist that you like (Juanes, Manu Chao, etc.) and the site will then stream music that it thinks you’ll like. Unfortunately it only works in the United States. I can’t experience it here in Mexico.

5. If you have iTunes, you can scroll to the bottom of the iTunes Store. There’s a link “Change Country”. If you set your country to Spain or Mexico you’ll get that country’s version of iTunes. You’ll see the most popular music and podcasts. It’s a great way to discover what’s popular now. This also works on YouTube. At the bottom of the homepage there’s a “change location” link.

August and I put together this Lenguajero Recommends – MP3 Music Store (US only). Any MP3s you buy from it help us continue with Lenguajero.com.

What music discoveries have you made lately? Share them in the comments or on twitter.

On Friday we had a great opportunity to sit down and talk to Kirsten Winkler for an EDUKWEST interview about Lenguajero. Here is the interview. Let us know if you have any feedback, comments, questions etc.

Earlier today we had a great opportunity to sit down and talk with Kirsten Winkler for her interview series at EDUKWEST. During the interview she asked us a few questions about our member metrics. At the time we didn’t have exact numbers.

Part of the reason is that Google Analytics, although a great tool, doesn’t let us see a lot of the numbers that we want to see. And, because Lenguajero is built on top of Google App Engine diving into our own data is not as easy as it should be, or would be if we were on another technical platform. We have put off doing this for far too long, but after a few hours of data diving we have some better numbers, specifically on our member demographics.

Lenguajero has 4200 members. There is almost a 50-50 split between English and Spanish learners. (In our interview we estimated 5500 members. This number was given in good faith and based on our returning visitors stats from Google Analytics.)

Here is the age breakdown of members:

And here is the country breakdown of members:

We are building the user fidelity and recency charts now, and will update this post with those charts as soon as we have them.

Watching Spanish movies (o sea Spanish language movies) is not only a great way to improve your Spanish, but a pretty damn fun one as well.  We’ve watched A LOT of Spanish language movies over the last year, and here are our top five recommendations for movies from the last decade. Enjoy!

Y Tu Mamá También – 2001
This Oscar nominated film by Alfonso Cuarón, starring Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, and Maribel Verdú focuses on the lives three young Mexicans. Two teenage boys, Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael García Bernal), from Mexico City convince Luisa (Maribel Verdú), a married woman, to take a road trip with them to an imaginary beach on the Pacific coast of Mexico. The movie is a coming of age story that explores sexuality and individuality, while tying in the real time economic and political backdrop of Mexico at the turn of the century.

Maria Llena Eres De Gracia (Maria Full of Grace) – 2004
This Academy Award nominated film, written and directed by Joshua Marston, explores the world of the Colombian-American drug trade, and the lives of those at the bottom of this world. María Álvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a 17-year-old Colombian girl, finds herself pregnant and alone after she quits her job at a flower plantation. Desperate for money she accepts a job as a mule, and flies to the U.S. with drugs hidden inside her body.

El Laberinto Del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) – 2006
Set in post-Civil War Spain in 1944, this Academy Award winner, directed by Guillermo del Toro, is the highest grossing Spanish language movie of all time. The movie tells the tale of Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a young girl who travels between two worlds. One is a world of fantasy and imagination, while the other is the harsh reality of life in rural Spain, where her mother’s second husband, a lieutenant in the fascist Spanish army, is attempting to brutally suppress an armed resistance.  The two worlds merge together as a character in Ofelia’s imaginary world (The Faun) orders her to carry out tasks in the real world.

Volver – 2006
Volver, directed by Pedro Almodóvar and starring Penélope Cruz, tells the story of two sisters, Raimunda (Cruz) and Sole, whose parents died in a fire several years before the start of the film.  The events surrounding their deaths are central to the movie, and the ghost of their mother plays an important role in the movie. Death is the central theme of the movie, and both sisters must cope with the deaths of their parents. In addition to their deaths Raimunda must deal with the death of the father of her daughter, who is killed by her daughter. Penélope Cruz was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress.

Sin Nombre (Without Name) – 2009
Sin Nombre is the story of a young Honduran woman, Sayra (Paulina Gaitán), who dreams of going to the United States in hopes of starting a better life.  To achieve her dreams she must first get to Mexico, and to do that she must stow away on a train that will take her north.  Her path crosses with a gang member played by Edgar Flores whose life changes when he kills the leader of his gang in order to help Sayra. This award winning film has garnered international admiration, and is on the short list for Best Foreign Language film at the 2010 Academy Awards.

Thanks to @Castellano3CAS for recommending Sin Nombre to us.

As with every other month end report I am shocked to be writing this right now. Seriously, where does the time go? Before I know it Lenguajero is going to be 6 months old, and that is a scary thing to think about.

Month four has been quite a bit different from the first three months. Instead of focusing on the short term, we have started to think about where we want the site to be in 6 months or a year, and have started to take steps to reach those goals. This means that there were less features introduced this month, and that we received less publicity. However, that does not mean that we didn’t have a few great moments this month.

• Traffic was down almost 9% against month three. However, this was mainly due to the two huge days of publicity that we had received during month three. Without those publicity spikes, or numbers stayed fairly steady averaging around 750-800 visits per day.

• We made $118 this month, which is a 33% improvement over month three. This is mainly due to affliate sales, as our adsense earnings dropped from approximately $95 dollars to $70 dollars.

• On the advertising note, we moved our advertising platform to google admanger to ensure that we are able to easily serve a variety of ads quickly and efficiently. Admanager also allows us to specifically target ads to users based on profile criteria. Currently we are only targeting ads based on which learning language and geography.

• After listening to feedback from students in a university Spanish course, in which Lenguajero had been included in the curriculum, and talking with the course professor, we made a fundamental long term decision to start working on tools to integrate Lenguajero into the classroom. We developed a beta version of Lenguajero – Classroom Edition, and are currently offering it for free for the next six months. As I mentioned above, this is a big strategic shift for us, and we hope to get lots of university and college professors signed up and trying it out. The more feedback the better!

• We launched the beginning of a series of conversation guides that we will be publishing in order to help Lenguajero members make the most out of their conversation exchanges. The conversation guides are available in .pdf format so that they can be used online, or printed off for face-to-face conversation exchanges.

A couple of months ago Lenguajero had the great fortune to be included in the curriculum of a conversational Spanish course being taught at Sacred Heart University. The course professor, Pilar Munday (@mundaysa), is an an advocate for introducing web2.0 technologies into the classroom.

We recently had the opportunity to ask the students of Professor Munday’s class what their experiences had been like on Lenguajero, and whether they felt that it integrated well with their classroom learning environment. Here are a few of the comments we received.

• Lenguajero ties in great to the classroom since I am in conversational Spanish, and talking with natives is a sure way to improve my Spanish. ~ Jennifer
• In general my overall experience was good. I made a really good friend and we talk as much as we can. I have found many people who are willing to talk and the site is easy to use. ~ Laura
• So far my experience on Lenguajero has been good. It was not hard at all to find someone to converse with, everyone is very eager to chat and learn. The quality of my calls are overall good. ~ Natasha

Encouraged by these positive responses, and by our own belief that we can offer a fantastic set of tools to Spanish and English classrooms around the world we have begun work on a new site feature, Lenguajero Classroom Edition.

This tool set will make it easy for college and university professors to integrate Lenguajero into their class curriculum. The free beta version, which will be ready for testing before month’s end, will allow teachers to:

• Create an account which can be linked to any number of students’ accounts
• Monitor how often and for how long students are having conversations
• Review and monitor students’ Writing Club submissions

We are really excited to be working on this, and want to hear from you. If you are interested in trying out the beta version of this program you can sign up here. If you  have any questions or comments, or if you would like to see other features included in this feature please contact us at august@lenguajero.com

I swear I was just writing the Month Two Report a couple of days ago. Where the heck did month three go?

Despite month three vanishing before my eyes, looking back at the Month Two Report and our notes from month three, I realize that quite a lot has happened this month. Here’s month three in review.

• Month three started with a big burst of publicity when Ben and Marina from Notes In Spanish decided to tell all their followers about us in their monthly newsletter. “Long-time listeners Natalie Gordon and August Flanagan have started an entire Spanish learning empire that could be a lot of use to you!” This led to our biggest day ever (both in traffic and revenue generation).

• Shortly after this great publicity the pirates attacked. Over the course of a couple of days spammers from Somalia and Senegal spent time creating accounts and manually sending spam messages to many of our users. It was an annoying couple of days having to deal with spam attacks as opposed to working on feature development. We were able to quickly implement some easy safeguards to prevent (or at least marginalize) similar attacks in the future.

• Site traffic increased 69% against month two’s traffic (which was a 61% increase against month one’s traffic).

• Our average daily ad revenue increased from $1.94 (previous month) to $2.95 (this month).

• We continued to receive positive publicity from the online language learning and travel communities.

http://elblogdelingles.blogspot.com/2009/10/hablar-ingles.html
http://globalmaverick.org/archives/467-interview-with-august-flanagan

• We built and launched a Question and Anwer Forum. Members can ask our community questions about learning Spanish or English, traveling, culture, or anything else related to our site. (Note: The forum is in an experimental stage right now. If it proves popular we will provide category listings, automatic email updates when people add a response to a question, voting for best answers, and more.)

• We redesigned the homepage for members who are signed in. (I love the new clean layout!)

• We added a Resources page to the website containing a list of links to our favorite Learn Spanish or Learn English resources.

• Natalie, who is awesome, hammered out innumberable bug fixes and feature improvements.

• Finally, on a personal note, we took a week off to travel to the Oaxacan coast with August’s parents. We found a beautiful, laid back beach and decided to get married on that beach with our friends and family in March, 2010.