week1
Greetings, courtesy, numbers 1–20
Almost everything this week is a fixed chunk. Greetings are learned whole, not taken apart.
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0 of 20 items in your deckComfort
Castilian Spanish
Greetings to a real conversation in ninety days.
The full ninety days, built on the same plan as the French course. Fifteen to twenty minutes a day: warm-up review, vocabulary recall, syntax, listening and speaking, then a one-line reflection. Spanish spells what it says, which makes the first weeks unusually kind.
Today
Day 10
to review
5
new items
1
minutes, roughly
The next fortnight
0 of 194 items in your deck.
Intervals: 1 · 3 · 7 · 14 · 30 · 60 · 90 days. Each item you get right moves one step further along.
The weeks
Adding a week puts its items into the review deck, a few a day.
week2
Personal information: name, age, family, where you live
Your own life, in Spanish. Everything this week should be true about you.
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week3
Common nouns: the home and food
Thirty-odd everyday objects, each learned together with its gender — which Spanish usually tells you honestly.
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week4
First sentence frames: I have, I want, I would like
You stop collecting words this week and start combining them. Almost no new vocabulary — reuse Weeks 1 to 3 inside these frames.
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Comfort
Milestone
- —Greet, thank, apologise, and count to twenty.
- —Introduce yourself — name, age, town, family, retirement — in four or five sentences.
- —Name thirty-plus everyday home and food objects, with their gender.
- —Order a drink or a meal politely with quisiera, and ask for the bill.
week5
Present tense: verb patterns and high-frequency verbs
Green takes over. Three regular patterns and seven irregular workhorses.
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week6
Questions: directions, prices, times
Magenta week. Seven question words, and enough fixed phrases to find a station, ask a price and understand the answer.
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week7
The past: recounting yesterday
Spanish has two past tenses in daily use, and which one you need depends on when it happened. That split is the whole lesson.
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week8
The near future, and joining sentences together
Ir a plus a verb gets you the future for almost no effort. Connectors then turn a list of sentences into a story.
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Comfort
Milestone
- —Conjugate high-frequency verbs in the present for yo, usted, él/ella and nosotros.
- —Choose correctly between ser and estar in ordinary sentences.
- —Ask for directions, prices and times using the question words.
- —Recount today with the perfect and yesterday with the simple past.
- —Talk about near-future plans using ir a plus an infinitive, and join clauses with y, pero, porque and así que.
week9
Your own life: hobbies, health and opinions
Phase 3 stops teaching structures and starts using them. This week also brings the one Spanish verb that works backwards.
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week10
Listening: following the gist
Mostly technique rather than vocabulary. The goal is the gist of a clip, not every word — and being comfortable with that is the actual skill.
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week11
Speaking: five minutes a day, out loud
Fluency over accuracy. The aim is to keep talking, not to be right.
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week12
A real task, and everything reviewed
No new grammar. One real thing done in Spanish, and a look back over ninety days.
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Milestone
- —Talk about your hobbies, your health and your opinions using gustar, encantar and the opinion frames.
- —Follow the gist of a two-minute Spanish clip using the three-step method.
- —Deliver a five-minute monologue on the five-part scaffold, with discourse markers, without correcting yourself mid-sentence.
- —Complete a real task in Spanish — read a menu, write a message, or book a table.
The ninety days
Days 1–30
Foundations
Greet, introduce yourself, name everyday things, and order politely.
Days 31–60
Everyday exchanges
Hold a short two-way conversation without notes.
Days 61–90
Going it alone
Handle a real trip — travel, shops, small talk, the unexpected.
Where Spanish hides things
Gustar runs backwards
Me gusta el deporte is sport is pleasing to me. The thing you like is the subject, so the verb agrees with it and not with you: me gusta el cine, me gustan los libros. The same applies to encantar and to me duele. Once you accept the structure it becomes automatic, but not before.
Two verbs for to be
Ser is what something is; estar is how or where it is right now. Soy inglés but estoy cansado. Estoy en casa, never soy en casa. When you are unsure, ask whether the fact could change by tomorrow — if it could, use estar.
Endings that lie
Most nouns wear their gender honestly — -o masculine, -a feminine — which makes Spanish far kinder than French. The exceptions are worth marking hard, because the ending is actively misleading: el día, el problema, el mapa are masculine; la mano and la foto are feminine.
El agua, la agua
A feminine noun starting with a stressed a- takes el for ease of pronunciation, but stays feminine: el agua fría, el aula pequeña. Only in the singular — las aguas. The article changes; the gender does not.
The voice
Every word on the site is clickable. It speaks through a voice installed on this computer, so it costs nothing and works with the wifi off — but it does need a Spanish voice to be installed. Without one the audio stays silent rather than read Spanish aloud in an English accent.
[Hola]
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