First, this app is amazing, and is completely worth the subscription price.About the new update:The update is overall excellent and fixes most of the minor problems and adds excellent things. The new interface is great, especially the way stories are no longer separated in two. Also, the easy way to search for stories is something I’ve wanted for a while. The new interface is also so much more smooth and all the minor stuttering is gone. The new iPad app designed for iPad is a feature I wish they’d added sooner, but I’m so glad it’s here. The new way the full translation works is so much I better where it stays on the sentence you are on and grays out the full translation of parts you haven’t reached yet. The new pause feature was a little weird for 5 minutes, but it is improvement I didn’t know I wanted.I think it would be good to show the new tutorial videos even to old users to explain the reasoning for the new pause features. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to download stories for use offline anymore or at least I can’t find the option after the update. I think this was an important feature especially for travel. Also, I’m not fully sold on the way the x-ray feature works now, and I would like the option to only show the translation of only the one word you click instead of all the shown words in the sentence. Also, I don’t like how you must pause to see the meaning of the unknown words now. Finally, it would be really nice to have the ability to export your unknown vocabulary into a spreadsheet or something with the sentence it came from.

This app is special because of the Soundbites I consider myself an advanced student and believe I have outgrown most apps. I take lessons with native speakers online a couple of times a week and generally go around listening to podcasts in Spanish including Radio Ambulate. I understand what the journalists are saying but often get lost with the interviewees. That’s where the Soundbites come in! They are carefully chosen snippets of the story featuring difficult pronunciation or interesting grammatical structure or a piece of cultural context. They are short and fun and motivating. You can listen at different speeds, reveal and hide the words and review a vocabulary list. You get explanation of patterns used with similar examples. They require little time commitment and I return to them every day. The Soundbites alone are worth the price but then you also get the whole stories if Radio Ambulante broken into segments, analyzes and explained. I highly recommend this app. It’s the one you will actually use and improve your Spanish while learning interesting things and having fun.

This app really is amazing for those trying to get comprehensible input. There are so many little features of design in this app that help improve your ability to focus on the dialogue. The fact that interviews are chopped up into 2 to 3 minute sections, that within each 2 to 3 minute segment there are further sections with summaries to orient you to the story. You have access to, but is otherwise hidden away, a full translation of the story, and when you request it, it pops up to that exact spot that corresponds to where you are instead of having to search for it. Having blanked out dashes for your eyes to follow really helps you focus on the audio. I find that when I listen to podcasts while going about my day as soon as the language gets a bit tricky it’s easy to lose focus and then you are lost, but the lines for your eyes follow really helps. Having available the option to keep track of vocabulary that you like as well as to export it to a spaced repetition app is also a very nice feature. There’s just a lot of thought that went into this that makes it very helpful.

I have used LingQ and think it’s great. For my learning objectives now, which are to move solidly into upper intermediate and then advanced Spanish, Lupa is ideal. I am focusing on Latin American Spanish dialects and that’s what Lupa has. Nothing against Spain, that is just not my focus at this time. I combine the listening and vocabulary on Lupa with the transcripts on the Radio Ambulante website. Several points: Lupa breaks down the podcasts into manageable chunks, there are notes in Lupa about Latin American customs I would not otherwise know, and the transcripts are excellent. Lupa flags errors in the spoken interviews (even as a native English speaker I sometimes speak with an error or two). So I can even learn the correct way to say something or if an article was misused. So it flags that for me. I am planning to transition from LingQ to Lupa. Again though my focus is Spanish. LingQ has many other languages. Great app and worth the subscription in my opinion. Better if you are at the intermediate level.