Start from zero with the Spanish words and phrases you will hear on your very first day. Clear meanings, simple pronunciation, and no grammar overload.
Spanish is one of the friendliest languages to start: it is written as it sounds. Here is the order that works.
Five clean vowel sounds and consistent spelling mean you can read Spanish out loud correctly almost from day one.
Greetings, everyday nouns with their article, and the ten verbs that carry most Spanish sentences. The same core set turns up in every language — see the first 100 words to learn in any language.
Gender, ser versus estar and verb endings arrive in small doses, attached to sentences you can already say. There is a reason for that order: why vocabulary comes before grammar.
Learn these and you can already understand and be understood in simple everyday situations.
Nouns are shown with their article (el, la). Learn the article together with the word from day one — it makes gender effortless later.
Eight sentences that cover most first conversations in Spanish.
A realistic order for your first weeks of Spanish.
Ten at a time, always with the article for nouns. Say each one out loud twice. At five to ten words a day that is under a week, and spaced retrieval is what makes them stay.
They give the words a home and can be used on your very first conversation.
Números, días de la semana and la hora unlock shopping, travel and small talk.
Subject plus one of the ten verbs plus a noun you know. Simple beats perfect.
Spanish is one of the kindest languages an English speaker can pick up: the spelling is regular, the sounds are few, and thousands of words are close enough to English to guess. What follows is the short version of what actually matters in your first few months.
Fewer than you think. The thirty words on this page are survival level. Around 100 words gets you through greetings, ordering food and asking simple questions. Around 500 words covers most routine daily exchanges, roughly the A0 to A1 range. At about 1,000 high-frequency words you can hold a simple conversation, and that thousand accounts for a very large share of everything said in ordinary Spanish. The research behind those numbers is in how many words you need to speak a language.
After that, frequency falls away sharply, which is why the order you learn words in matters far more than the total. There is also a bonus that Spanish gives away for free: whole families of English words map across predictably. English words ending in -tion almost always become -ción (nation becomes nación), and -ty becomes -dad (city becomes ciudad). Learning that pattern is worth several hundred words on its own.
Both are levels in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. A0 is absolute beginner, with no prior Spanish assumed. A1 means you can introduce yourself, ask and answer simple questions about where you live, people you know and things you have, and follow speech when someone talks slowly and clearly. What A1 level actually means walks through the descriptors in full.
The official Spanish certificate at this level is the DELE A1, awarded by the Instituto Cervantes on behalf of the Spanish Ministry of Education. It is recognised worldwide and does not expire, but there is no need to think about it until you are comfortably past the vocabulary on this page.
Spanish has five vowel sounds and they never change. Compare that with the dozen or so in English, where a is pronounced differently in cat, car, care and call. Once you have the five, you can read almost any Spanish word aloud correctly:
Spanish has two verbs for to be and this is the thing beginners most often ask about. The usual rule — permanent versus temporary — is close enough to start with but breaks quickly. A more reliable version: ser describes what something is, and estar describes what state it is in, including where it is.
Soy médico, I am a doctor, is identity. Estoy cansado, I am tired, is a state. The pair that makes it click: la sopa es rica means the soup is delicious as a kind of soup, while la sopa está rica means this particular bowl tastes good right now. You do not need to master this at thirty words, but knowing why there are two verbs stops it feeling arbitrary later.
Spanish nouns are masculine or feminine, and unlike German there is a rule that mostly works: words ending in -o are usually masculine, words ending in -a are usually feminine. That single pattern covers a large majority of nouns you will meet early.
The exceptions are worth meeting once rather than fearing: el día, el problema and el mapa are masculine despite the ending, and la mano is feminine. As with any gendered language, the fix is to store the article with the noun from the beginning — la casa, not casa.
Beginners lose time worrying about this. Spanish is spoken by around half a billion people and the differences between varieties are smaller than the differences between British and American English. A Mexican and a Spaniard understand each other without effort.
Two things do differ. Spain uses vosotros for an informal group where Latin America uses ustedes, and Spain pronounces c before e or i, and z, as a soft th, where Latin America says s. Pick whichever you are more likely to hear, learn it consistently, and stop thinking about it.
A surprising number of people who finish a first foreign language start a second within the year, and the second one is easier — not because the language is simpler, but because you now know how you learn.
There is one shortcut worth knowing when that happens. Once Spanish is a working language for you, learning your next language through Spanish rather than through English is faster, because you stop translating twice. That is exactly what alemánbásico does for German: the same high-frequency vocabulary approach used on this page, taught entirely in Spanish.
Comparatively, yes. Spanish spelling is regular, it has only five vowel sounds, and English shares a very large amount of Latin-derived vocabulary with it. The parts that take real work are rolled r sounds, the two verbs for to be, and the subjunctive, and none of those matter in your first weeks.
With 15 to 20 focused minutes a day, most beginners reach A1 in roughly two to four months. Spanish tends to move faster than average at this level because pronunciation stops being an obstacle very early.
Vocabulary first. Spanish verb conjugation looks intimidating written out as tables, but it is far easier to absorb once you already recognise the words the endings are attached to. The longer answer, with the point where the balance shifts, is in vocabulary or grammar first.
Five to ten new words a day, always with the article for nouns. That pace adds up to well over a thousand words in a year, and it leaves enough time to review the ones you learned last week, which is what actually keeps them. How many words to learn per day explains why the ceiling is that low.
These six guides are language-neutral — they cover the method rather than the words, so they apply whichever language you are starting.
Every course begins at absolute beginner level.