How to learn Spanish fast

Fast does not mean cramming. Cramming is how you learn a word four times and still not have it. Fast means that what you learn on Monday is still there in March, so each week you add to the last instead of replacing it.

The research on memory has been clear about how to do that for a long time. Here it is, applied to Spanish, with a plan at the end.

Produce the word. Do not recognise it.

Tapping the right answer out of four feels like learning. It mostly is not.

In Rowland’s 2014 review of the published experiments on testing yourself, the benefits were larger from recalling an answer from memory than from recognising it among options. Kang, McDermott and Roediger put short-answer questions against multiple choice and found short answer was better, as long as learners saw the correct answer afterwards. Without that feedback the order reversed, which is worth knowing: producing and then checking is the useful pair.

For Spanish this means: type the word, say the sentence, write the line. The moment you have to pull cansada out of your own head instead of spotting it in a list, the memory gets stronger. If you never produce a word from nothing in your current practice, change that first.

Bring each word back before it goes

Everything you learn fades on a curve. Ebbinghaus measured it in 1885 and Murre and Dros got the same curve when they repeated the experiment in 2015: a large share gone within a day, more within a week, then a slow tail.

The way to beat the curve is not to review everything every day. It is to see each word again near the point you would lose it, then after a longer gap, then longer again. Cepeda and colleagues went through 317 experiments and found spaced practice is better than massed practice, and that the best gap grows the longer you need the memory to last. You can leave a word you got right twice for a week. A word you missed comes up again sooner.

Nobody can run that timing by hand past a few hundred words. Software is better at this than a person. Most language apps still do not have it: on a course you move forward along a path, with review at no particular time. On a memory schedule every word is tracked separately. What that schedule can promise and what it cannot is in our spaced repetition guide.

Learn the words in the order they show up

Spanish has hundreds of thousands of words. You need a few thousand to follow most of what people say and write, and which few thousand is not a mystery. Word frequency lists exist, and the words at the top of the list make up most of any text.

That means the fastest route is to learn common words first, and to come across them in real sentences, because a word’s meaning comes with its company. Llevar on a flashcard is “to carry”. Llevo tres años aquí is “I have been here three years”. You need the sentence.

There are numbers on this in How many words you need to read Spanish. The short version: you get more from the first thousand words than from the next ten thousand, and you should get them in sentences, spoken aloud, as early as you can.

The plan, at thirty minutes a day

Twenty minutes: produce and review. A session where you type Spanish words into real sentences, with the meaning in view and a voice reading each one. New words in frequency order, old words back on their schedule. If you use an app, check that you can do this in it. If you use paper, a sentence with a gap is better than a word on a card.

Ten minutes: real Spanish. A short news article, a page of a book, a two-minute clip. Look up what you do not know. Put the words you looked up into tomorrow’s practice. In it you see that the common words really are common, and you find out what you can already follow.

Every day. A schedule is no use if you do not show up for it. Thirty minutes daily is better than three hours on Sunday. The spacing research is a body of results about showing up at intervals.

What fast looks like in practice

A word you learned three weeks ago comes up in a news article and you do not stop on it. A sentence you could not have produced last month comes out whole. The share of a text you can read without help goes up, month on month, and you can see it go up.

That is the speed that matters. Produce the words, put them on a schedule so they come up again, and come across them in real Spanish.