Learn Spanish

Español · a free course from absolute beginner to C2 · one lesson a day

Spanish is the most useful second language an English speaker can pick up, and the easiest of the big ones to make early progress in. The sounds are few and stable, the spelling tells you where the stress falls, and enough of the vocabulary rhymes with English that your first reading is comprehensible far sooner than it has any right to be. Twenty countries speak it as a first language, and it is the one language on this site where the practice will come and find you rather than the other way round.

What is hard about Spanish, and what this course does about it

What makes Spanish hard is not the first month but the fourth. Verbs carry the person, the tense and the mood in their endings, and there are two past tenses that English collapses into one, plus a whole mood — the subjunctive — for things that are wished, doubted or not yet true. The course treats those as the difficulties they are: each gets its own lesson with the rule written out and a table, and then keeps coming back in the reading and listening of later lessons rather than being ticked off and dropped.

What the course covers

The syllabus is 366 numbered steps, and the first 402 of them have a lesson written by hand behind them — the explanation, the examples and the questions, not a template filled in. 31 of those steps are the grammar core: everything you need before the course turns to recombining it, which is the work that carries you from intermediate to C2.

The first 14 grammar points, in order

Straight from the course's own syllabus. Each gets its own lesson, and comes back in the reading and listening of later ones.

1. Singular subject pronouns (yo, tú, él/ella, usted) and ser for one person
2. Plural subject pronouns (nosotros, vosotros, ellos, ustedes) and the plural of ser
3. Ser vs estar: the two Spanish verbs for "to be" and when to use each
4. Regular present tense of -AR verbs (hablar, trabajar, estudiar)
5. Regular present tense of -ER and -IR verbs (comer, vivir, beber)
6. Noun gender and the articles el, la, un and una
7. Plurals: los, las, and adding -s or -es to the noun
8. Irregular present-tense verbs: tener and ir
9. Irregular present-tense verbs: hacer and querer
10. Stem-changing present-tense verbs (e→ie, o→ue, e→i)
11. The near future: ir a + infinitive
12. The present progressive: estar + -ando/-iendo
13. Possessive adjectives (mi, tu, su, nuestro)
14. Demonstrative adjectives (este, ese, aquel)

How one lesson works

Around 20–30 minutes at the fullest setting. Three lengths to choose from, and a shorter one spreads each grammar point over more lessons rather than taking the support away.

1. Review first. Every card that is due today comes back before anything new starts — all of them, with no cap, because a cap on reviews is a cap on what you remember.
2. New words. A handful of new words, dealt straight down the frequency list from wherever you got to, each with its recording.
3. The grammar. One point, explained in writing with worked examples and tables, before the questions that test it.
4. Reading. A passage in Spanish in three parts, written from words you have already been taught, with comprehension questions.
5. Listening. The same again for the ear, in three parts.
6. Writing. From lesson 7, one task where you produce Spanish of your own and get it back marked.

The words, and the order they come in

The course's vocabulary is a frequency list 18,348 words long, and the deck deals it in rank order from word one — so the words you meet first are the ones standing between you and an ordinary sentence. You can read the top of that list without signing up: the most common Spanish words.

The course's words and phrases are recorded in a Spanish voice — 5,376 clips, counted on the server — and the listening section plays them as connected speech rather than as a word list.

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