Lenguajero Blog

The poor neglected Lenguajero blog has been sitting idle for a few months now, but that doesn’t mean that we have.

Here’s what the Lenguajero team has been up to since the last blog post (7 months ago).

1. We relocated from Oaxaca, Mexico to Vancouver, B.C. It’s been a refreshing change of pace, and we are enjoying settling into a new city for a while.

2. We took a bit of time off from Lenguajero to work on our side project TOEFL Now.

3. The Lenguajero community passed the 10,000 member mark.

4. We launched our first products, two e-books for intermediate and advanced Spanish learners that teach slang and common colloquial phrases from Spain and Mexico. The books, aptly named Spanish in Spain and Spanish in Mexico, have been a great little side project, and we’ve had about 40 sales in the first week.

5. We’ve come up with some great plans for end-of-year. Today we launched the member podcasts, a place for our members to listen to Spanish and English podcasts created by other Lenguajero members. We have some cool ideas for this feature, and will have some follow up announcements soon.

Even though Lenguajero is a Spanish/English language learning community most of the posts that we write here on the Lenguajero Blog tend to focus on learning Spanish. That is because Natalie and I have both been studying Spanish for over a year now, and we’re personally really passionate about it.

However, aside from learning Spanish we love helping other people learn English. We spent the last 8 months volunteering as English teachers at a small community-based learning center here in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was a great experience that, at least in my case, emphasized how hard it is to be a good language educator.

A couple of months ago we decided to collaborate on a small side project with our good friend Sarah Menkedick, who is a much better teacher than either Natalie or I ever will be. We decided to branch off from the bajillion other learning English services, sites, tools, etc. and focus on a much smaller niche, English learners preparing for the TOEFL iBT.

Sarah has years of experience writing and marking the TOEFL, so we sat down and wrote a TOEFL eBook filled with tips and strategies from Sarah on how to improve your score on the TOEFL iBT. We recently launched the ebook, and the site – TOEFL Now, so if you are preparing for the TOEFL, or if you are an educator please go check out the site and let us know what you think.

TOEFL Now will help you raise your TOEFL score. There is a Speaking section, a Writing section and a TOEFL forum.

We also have an affiliate program. If you have an audience of English-learners it might be a good fit.

Follow TOEFL_Now on Twitter.

As my quest for Spanish fluency continues, I’ve discovered that my Spanish learning can benefit from one of my hobbies.  I think that James Beard really said it best when he stated, “Food is our common ground, a universal experience.“  Food, in many cultures, is at the core of life.  It creates an environment in which to enjoy company, relax, and really feel that you are a part of the culture.  After doing some reading online about Spanish bars and the infamous “tapa” appetizer, I decided to try and conquer one of the recipes and taste Tortilla Española for myself.

I went in search of a recipe in Spanish that I could attempt to prepare and came across a wonderful little blog that is full of interesting recetas (recipes).  El Microverso has an excellent and easy instructional YouTube video to prepare tortilla de patatas. The ingredients for this recipe are in any supermarket.  You simply need potatoes, eggs, an onion, olive oil, and salt.  I like this video because it’s suitable for all levels of Spanish learner and there is no tricky measuring of ingredients.  The video is set to music and there is text explaining the ingredients and cooking process.  Below I’ll walk you through this delicious Spanish lesson.

1. First, I watched the video all the way through so there were no surprises. I made sure that I understood each of the verbs that were used in the video.  What I like is that this video demonstrates the action rather than giving you the English translation.  Learning this way mimics the way a child would learn to do something and is an effective way of learning a language.
2. After I had watched the entire video I then read some of the tips below the video.  These answer a lot of questions about the quantity of ingredients, use of the oil, and how to turn the tortilla.
3. Next, it was time to dive in and either succeed or fail.  I used to be notorious for botching almost every recipe imaginable. Since then my skills have improved but the insecure feeling was present when I started cooking.  I sliced the potatoes as in the video, tearfully sliced the onion, and added them both to the heated oil in the skillet with a dash of salt.  I stirred the potatoes and onions in the skillet with the olive oil until they had reached the same color as the potatoes in the video.
4. While the potatoes and onions were cooking in the oil I cracked the eggs into a large bowl and scrambled them.  When the potatoes and onions were done I added them to the bowl of eggs.  It’s important after this step to add more oil to the skillet and assure that the oil is hot before adding the egg, potato and onion mixture.
5. Add the mixture to the skillet and wait for the eggs to brown.  You can lift up slightly underneath the tortilla to check the color.  When you think the tortilla has achieved the right consistency and color place a plate over the top of the skillet and then flip the tortilla onto the plate.  Quickly add a bit more olive oil to the skillet and slide the tortilla, raw side down, into the skillet once again to cook the other side.  When the other side has achieved the same look as the previous side, use the plate once again to flip the tortilla out of the skillet.  Then enjoy!

The finished product is pictured above. This tortilla de patata could easily feed four people so I encourage you to check out the recipes at the El Microverso blog and see what interesting things you can create to share with others!  It’s an excellent way to bring you one step closer to the culture while learning Spanish.

If you have any interesting recipes or tips you’d like to share please share them in the comments!

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.

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.