Enhance the search functionality

[rodney]

Maybe I just don't know what I'm doing, but if you do a search for Costa Rica, it returns you the entire regional series. It would be nice if the search only returned the lessons on Costa Rica.

[Joseph]

Rodney,

Hi there. Thanks so much for your active participation in the course. The issue of search functionality for the Regional Series has just been brought to our attention. So, no, it's not you, and not, you're not the only one!

Let me explain why this has happened and how we plan on fixing it. First, because the Regional Series started out as an experiment (one that has turned out to be successful), we weren't really sure what was going to become of it.

At first, we envisioned having more regions than we currently do, which would mean fewer lessons of each region; but since we've established three strong regions, we've decided to continue with these and continue looking for other regional teams (Colombia and Mexico are next on the list).

The other reason why the Regional Lessons weren't originally designed on their own feed is because we saw (and I, to a certain extent, still see) the real value of the Regional Series in the ability to reference one regional lesson to the corresponding newbie lesson and to any other corresponding regional lessons. So, for example, if you listen to Newbie 19, the idea would be to listen to Iberian 19, Peruvian 19 and Costa Rican 19 as well.

However, it's become clear that some listeners would prefer to listen to one Region, be it because they are taking a trip there, be it because of personal taste, so we recognize the need to separate the regions of the Regional Series into separate types, so that they can be searched on their own.

Now, the answer. We have a quick fix for this; one which I'm not very fond of, but which is at least a step in the right direction: We're going to go through each Regional Lesson and give it a topic tag with the Region. This way, if you're listening to a Costa Rican Lesson, you'll be able to click the "topic" tag that will read "Costa Rican" and see all the Costa Rican Lessons published in the Regional Series. The same will go for the Iberian and Peruvian Lessons.

The real goal though is to separate each "region" into it's own Lesson Type, so that you can locate Costa Rican Lessons just like you can Newbie, Beginner, Verb Conjugation, etc.

I apologize for the inconvenience. The importance of referencing is very, very clear to me and I assure you that we're working to get these two fixes implemented as soon as possible. And, let me thank you for you understand and requests; if listeners like you did not let us know your needs, it would be a lot harder to make these kinds of developments.

Le saluda cordialmente,
Joseph

[Bouks]

Wow, Joseph, you and the staff are working very hard, and it's much appreciated.

Are you still going to have some reference in the Regional lessons to a lesson in the standard series? Even if you just mention it in the podcast, that's fine, as long as I know where to go to reference the standard dialogue.

Although I am anxious to see Intermediate lessons, I would like to say that the exposure to regional lessons has been very good for me. When I took Spanish in high school and college, we didn't spend a lot of time learning expressions from different regions. We stuck to the textbook. So although I know that the Latino world is diverse, I didn't have any idea how that works linguistically until encountering SpanishPod101.