Lenguajero Blog

We’ve been big fans of Notes in Spanish for quite some time. So, we invited Leah Budke to write a review of NIS, and explain what makes it so great.

After spending quite a bit of time listening to Spanish podcasts, I felt quite fortunate to stumble across Ben and Marina’s Notes in Spanish site and podcasts.  Surely you’ve all experienced the feeling of frustration during the language learning process.  It’s one thing to learn from a book, but quite another when you’re in the world attempting to converse in Spanish and there are phrases or manners of saying phrases which you can’t quite grasp.  In their podcasts, Ben and Marina converse about normal things occurring in Spain and in the world in general.  This is a great substitute for real immersion because Ben and Marina are using common conversational phrases and conversing about real occurrences.  There are audio podcasts for each level of Spanish from beginners to advanced and the podcasts can be listened to for free.  There are many things that you can learn from the context of the conversations, but if you subscribe to Notes in Spanish you can download the transcript and use the worksheet to help you gain even more from the podcast.  Below I will go into a little detail about how the site is organized and what it has to offer for each level of language learner.

Inspired Beginners

For the Spanish newcomer the inspired beginners section is where it’s at.  I recommend that you to start at the very first podcast and go through them all.  The first audio podcast for beginners starts with Ben and Marina introducing themselves and explaining their backgrounds.  They continue to explain the concept behind Notes in Spanish and how they hope to teach the things you might not learn in a textbook.  They explain the usage of the verb gustar, phrases to help make small talk, and other basic phrases to get your Spanish “arsenal” up to date.  In addition to being useful for beginners, others that already have an understanding of Spanish can benefit by listening and refreshing their memories.  If you are a beginner or perhaps trying to get back into learning Spanish, it can be very motivating to know that Ben has been through everything you’re going through at the moment and is still learning new words and phrases.

Need some extra help? If you feel like the podcast is going just a bit too fast for you, you most definitely would benefit from having the transcript of the conversation right in front of you.  You can then make notes to help you remember particular things from the podcast and continue to study it at a later time, with or without listening to the podcast.  You can obtain the worksheets for the beginners’ podcasts here.

Intermediate

In the intermediate podcasts Ben and Marina have a regular conversation about what is occurring in Spain or what is occurring in their personal lives.  They speak fairly slowly so that the listeners can understand and hear clearly every word they pronounce.  At the end of the podcast Ben and Marina speak just a little bit about what they have talked about during their conversation. If you still feel like you’re not grasping enough of the information from the context of the conversation you can purchase the transcripts and worksheets on the website.

Advanced

The advanced audio section is the highest level of Spanish that Notes in Spanish offers.  In this section you will probably notice that Ben and Marina talk a bit faster than they did in the intermediate section.  The advanced level is where Notes in Spanish started.  Podcasts 1-34 are the original podcasts of Notes and Spanish.  The first 34 audio recordings do not have accompanying worksheets or transcripts.  If you have benefited or think you will benefit most from listening along with the transcripts then the transcripts can be purchased starting at podcast 35.

Notes in Spanish Blog

In addition to audio podcasts there is a lot of other useful information on the Notes in Spanish site.  Go to the blog to see interesting videos and easy explanations of some of the most confusing things in the Spanish language.  Learn how to use tricky verbs like dar and become an expert at the elusive subjunctive as well as many other helpful things.

Notes in Spanish Gold

Finally, Ben and Marina have recently launched Notes in Spanish Gold, a subscription based service where they offer new podcasts w/ transcripts on a weekly basis. One difference between these podcasts and the others that they offer is that at the end of each podcast they spend several minutes reviewing new phrases and slang. The podcasts tend to be a little longer than the normal podcasts (about 20 minutes).

If you like what you’ve seen on the Notes in Spanish website be sure to sign up for the free newsletter so you can keep up to date on all the new things occurring with Notes in Spanish.

Author’s Bio:

Leah Budke is a college student currently working on obtaining bachelor’s degrees in Spanish and Art Education at Fort Hays State University.  She has always had an interest in languages and cultures and is continually expanding her knowledge of other ways of life.  She has studied abroad in Italy and is planning to feed her travel bug by studying abroad in Spain.  In addition to learning languages, studying cultures and traveling, Leah is passionate about human rights issues, environmental issues and animal rights.  You can read more of her writings on her blog:  www.futureexpat.wordpress.com.

A few days ago Lenguajero turned 6 months old. It’s hard to believe how much our little bootstrapped Latin America startup has grown in these last 6 months, but more importantly how our knowledge has grown with it.

As we built the site in Colombia, expanded on it from Costa Rica and Ecuador, and finally launched it and watched it grow from Mexico I feel as though I have learned far more than I ever would in business school. Here are 4 important lessons that I’ve learned during the last 6 months.

1. Launch early and let your users tell you what they want.

This is pretty much straight out of the lean development playbook, which we have followed unwaveringly. In a nutshell this means that we spent very little time developing our initial product. We launched within three months (and we were only working four hours a day at that point).

We got immediate feedback from our early users who all agreed on one thing – they weren’t interested in using the site how we’d originally thought they would. All of our initial assumptions were wrong. We thought that there would be a huge demand for a web space where you could go online, choose a discussion topic from a list, prepare for your conversation before hand, find someone to who wanted to talk about the same thing, and then sit down and have a no frills conversation exchange (in Spanish and English) for 30 minutes. Nope.

Turns out instead that people want to make small talk before they ever move on to bigger and broader topics. However, they do want to practice writing about these topics in the language they are learning, and receive feedback from native speakers. This knowledge helped us quickly build an launch our Writing Club, which has remained one of our most popular features.

The three things that we have focused on are:

1. Not worrying about problems until they are problems (i.e don’t fix it if it ain’t broke).
2. Doing the minimal amount of work at every stage of the development process, then waiting for user feedback.
3. Putting ourselves in a position where we can respond to any issue or idea quickly and efficiently. We did this when the pirates attacked us.

2. Having a product or a service to sell beats the hell out of hoping to make money on advertising.

We recently launched our first product, TOEFL Tips and Strategies eBook. In the last 48 hours we’ve made more money selling the TOEFL eBook than we usually make in two weeks of advertising with Google Adsense.

As David Heinemeier Hansson said on a recent 37signals podcast “Having a price is pretty good for getting profits. You have customers, they pay money for a product or service, and you get profits. That works for us.”

3. “You should think a little more about your SEO and viral strategy rather than depending on your slacker friends.”

We knew next to nothing about SEO when we launched our site, thus prompting the above quote from a friend of ours. Oh, that’s not to say that we didn’t have a plan, because we did. Our plan: Get all of our friends with blogs to link to us with the keywords we wanted, and set the title of our site to match these keywords (in our case ‘Practice Spanish Online’). We figured that would get us on the first page of search results within a couple of weeks of launching.

To anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of SEO strategies the above plan will seem absolutely laughable. We’ve fortunately come a long way since then, and have seen our SEO goals come to fruition as we have moved onto the first page for all of the terms we want to be hitting on, and are in the top three for our primary term (Practice Spanish Online).

We have even started offering SEO consulting services to bloggers who are more interested in writing, and less interested in the technical stuff.

4. Take advantage of living in the future.

“In the age of the all encompassing “Cloud” you no longer need things like your own servers, or an office full of people to get shit done. Instead we looked to the web for solutions to all of the challenges we faced.

One word – outsourcing. Websites like eLance and 99designs connected us with designers and programmers from around the world, and allowed us to outsource the work that we couldn’t do ourselves. At one point in time I was coordinating profile page design with a guy in Taiwan while Natalie was messaging with a team in Romania that was doing the HTML & CSS for our homepage. All this was done while sipping coffee in the comforts of our apartment in Colombia.”

The two paragraphs above are from an article I wrote for Matador five months ago. Not only are we still die hard believers that you don’t need an office we have continued to prove that you can coordinate your project from anywhere in the world. Whether it be outsourcing the development of a Flash voice recorder to Romania, hiring a personal assistant in Pakistan, or connecting with advisors and educators in the United States, France and Argentina, we have been able to connect with the people we need to connect with while sitting in our garden office and feasting on fresh tamales and fruit juice.

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.