Learn Spanish with flashcards powered by a spaced repetition algorithm backed by cognitive science. Choose a topic or create your own cards, and the algorithm takes care of the rest.
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Scheduled review
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Hmmmm… I know thisAh yes, lo, of course
Pocket dictionary
A1C2
100+
Grammar
160+
Verbs
10K
Vocabulary
20+
Games
100%
Offline
Coming soonApp Store
Coming soonGoogle Play
Neither link is live yet. They go up the day the app does.
Spaced repetition
Spanish flashcards that come back just before you forget.
Discover how our science-backed spaced repetition engine helps you learn Spanish faster. Review four flashcards exactly as they'll appear in the app, then see when the algorithm schedules your next review.
4 cards left
Translation
Fill in the blank
Situation
Phrase
TranslationFill in the blankSituationPhrase
¿Dónde está el hotel?
Where is the hotel?
está, not es: where a thing is right now.
Rate yourself. Honestly.
You did not pick that date. The engine did, from the button you just pressed.
TranslationFill in the blankSituationPhrase
¿Cómo te ___llamas?
What's your name?
Word for word: how do you call yourself. The verb turns back on the speaker, so the ending follows the person: me llamo, te llamas.
Rate yourself. Honestly.
You did not pick that date. The engine did, from the button you just pressed.
TranslationFill in the blankSituationPhrase
With no signal you can't find the hostel; you ask where they sell SIM cards.
¿Dónde venden tarjetas SIM?
Where do they sell SIM cards?
venden, they sell: Spanish asks with the third person plural where English reaches for where can I buy.
Rate yourself. Honestly.
You did not pick that date. The engine did, from the button you just pressed.
TranslationFill in the blankSituationPhrase
The market is at the harbour.
está en el puerto
El mercado está en el puerto.
está en, is at: the location verb from the first card, produced this time instead of read.
Rate yourself. Honestly.
You did not pick that date. The engine did, from the button you just pressed.
¡Uy!In a few minutes
Mmm…In 8 days
¡Vale!In 11 days
¡Muy fácil!In 19 days
That is the session.
Four cards read cold, and you already speak more Spanish than you thought. In the app it is a few more, and it ends the same way: the door opens.
The horizon
Todayyour card12
Tomorrow9
In 4 days4
Lateryour card31
The horizon, rebuilt here from the app's own screen: what comes back, day by day. Your card just filed itself there, and the numbers around it are one learner's.
What sticks100%Frequent recallsSpaced recallsWhat the recalls give back10 min1 day1 week1 month6 months
Your brain forgets along a fairly predictable curve: you hold almost all of it right after learning, then it fades bit by bit if nothing brings it back. Predictable means schedulable, and that is what spaced repetition is built on: every recall lands just before the fall, and buys a longer reprieve.
Say it out loud first.
Recalling a word costs you something, and that cost is what makes it stay. Reading it again costs nothing, and teaches nothing.
You never pick the date.
FSRS does, a published algorithm, used here through the ts-fsrs library. The intervals are not ours to invent.
One queue holds all of it.
Four free themes today, from the Survival Kit to Astronomy, plus the story, which brings its own. You can run all four at once, and every card you keep lands in the same queue.
Your Spanish level
Track your Spanish level, A1 to C2, without a single test.
Every card is filed by level and by tense before you ever meet it. What you remember of those cards is what your level is made of, and it moves when your memory moves.
Your stats
What reviewing has built
Level (estimated)
A1
58% to A2
PresentesolidPerfectoin progress
Maturity
35% mastered
New241Learning318Mastered298
Your stats, rebuilt here from the app's own screen. The engine, the ladder and the gate are the real ones; the numbers standing on them are one learner's.
Every card knows its own level.
A card is authored with a tier and a tense, never sorted out afterwards. A harder card weighs more, which is what stops a pile of easy words from buying you a level.
Your level is your memory, scored.
The engine reads how well you would recall every card of the course, not only the ones you picked, and turns that into one score out of 100 and one rung of the CEFR ladder.
And it refuses to guess.
Nothing is shown before 20 cards over 3 separate days, and once you hold a rung you keep it through 7 days below it. A level that flickers is a level that means nothing.
What adds up
616
words learned
142
review days
16
stops completed
14
grammar sheets
Mi Barco
What you earn, you keep.
Your ship is built one review day at a time. It never goes out, it never falls back, and a week away takes nothing from it.
The raft1d
The rowboat7d
The sloop30d
142dThe schooner75d
The brigantine150d
The frigate300d
The galleon600d
The flagship1,000d
In the app, it sits on Home beside your review days. Tap it and it shows you the route to the next one.
Play
20+ interactive games designed to help you learn Spanish.
La Feria is your Spanish carnival: picture, audio, spelling, speed, sentences and verbs. Every game works offline.
Three of them, playable right here. Eleven more are in the app.
Perico repite
Caza el Error
Which of Barba's words is wrong?
Round 1/3
Barba Roja
«Soyhambre»
Olé sets it right
Tengo hambre
In Spanish hunger is something you have, never something you are.
Round 1/3
Barba Roja
«»
Olé sets it right
Tengo hambre
In Spanish hunger is something you have, never something you are.
Round 2/3
Barba Roja
«»
Olé sets it right
¿Dónde está el mercado?
Hay is for a market nobody has found yet. With el, it is already the one he means, so está.
Round 3/3
Barba Roja
«»
Olé sets it right
Yo soy de Cádiz
Yo takes soy. Es belongs to him, to her, to the ship.
¡Olé! Three sentences, three blunders caught.
Caza el Error, rebuilt here from the app's own screen.
Three of Barba's blunders. A real round runs five.
That is the oneNot that word
La imprenta
La Gramática
Set the missing word before it prints.
Question 1/3
Tengo veinte añosI'm twenty years old
¡IMPRESO!
SoyTengoEstoy
Years are something you HAVE in Spanish, exactly as in French. Ser and estar are both traps here.
Question 1/3
___Tengo veinte añosI'm twenty years old
¡IMPRESO!
Years are something you HAVE in Spanish, exactly as in French. Ser and estar are both traps here.
Question 2/3
¿Dónde ___está el baño?Where's the bathroom?
¡IMPRESO!
Hay is for a bathroom nobody has found yet. With el, it is already the one you mean, so está.
Question 3/3
¿De dónde ___eres?Where are you from?
¡IMPRESO!
Ser for where you are from, and the you form is eres. Soy is what you answer with.
¡Olé! Three sentences, three words set.
La Gramática, rebuilt here from the app's own screen.
Three cards out of the app. A real round runs ten.
That is the oneNot that one
El Enredo
Set the letters, one word at a time.
1C2H3ADIOSSL4GRACIAS
1Down·house
2Down·Hello
3Across·Goodbye
4Across·Thank you
Every word is placed
El Enredo, rebuilt here from the app's own screen.
Four cards out of the deck. The app builds a new grid every round.
The sentence, the word Barba got wrong and Olé's version, for a browser that will not play the round.
Perico repite
Caza el Error
Which of Barba's words is wrong?
Round 1/3
Barba Roja
«Soyhambre»
That is the one
Olé sets it right
Tengo hambre
In Spanish hunger is something you have, never something you are.
Caza el Error, rebuilt here from the app's own screen.
Three of Barba's blunders. A real round runs five.
The story runs 9 acts and 96 stops. A stop is three to six minutes: a scene, a mini game, and up to three cards for your deck. Most of them leave you a grammar rule as well.
1.1
Barba Roja
Ah, la cocinera! The fish are for her. Tres monedas, three coins, not one more. When I haggle, I never lose.
la cocinerathe cook
Tres monedasThree coins
Tap to continue
The scene
Barba speaks your language, and the Spanish lights up inside his line.
1.1
In Spanish…
The article says he or she, the noun at times
Gender of person nouns
The article says whether a trade names a man or a woman, and the noun follows in three ways:
it does not move, and the article alone tells them apart;
its ending changes, an -o becoming -a or an -a added on: el marinero, la marinera;
the feminine is a word of its own, learnt as it comes.
The noun does not move
el estudiantela estudiantethe student
el pilotola pilotothe pilot
The noun's ending changes
el marinerola marinerathe sailor
The rule
The day's rule, drawn: one trade, two people, and the article that tells them apart.
6/6Skip
Say who it is: a man, a woman, or both.
Spanish
el marinero
la cocinera
el profesor
el capitán
la profesora
el piloto, la piloto
English
the sailor
the cook
the teacher
the captain
the teacher
the pilot
A man
A woman
Both
A man
A woman
Both
el marinero
la cocinera
el profesor
el capitán
la profesora
el piloto, la piloto
The right form:
el marinero
el tells you who: a man. The -o of marinero says it again, but the article is what always settles it.
The right form:
la cocinera
la says her: the article settles it, and the -a of cocinera goes along with it.
The right form:
el profesor
The ending of profesor says nothing, but el speaks: a man. She would be la profesora.
The right form:
el capitán
el tells you it is him: capitán wears no mark, and needs none, the article speaks for it.
The right form:
la profesora
la and the -a ending say one thing: profesora is the woman's form.
The right form:
el piloto, la piloto
The word does not move, only the articles change: el piloto, la piloto, one word for both.
Continuar
The game
Every word goes under its seal: a man, a woman, or both.
Your turn: press a seal, then Comprobar.
3 cartas for the notebook
el marinerothe sailor, a man
la marinerathe sailor, a woman
la cocinerathe cook, a woman
File 3 cartas into the notebook
The cards
The stop's words go into your deck, and come back when they are due.
BITÁCORA · Act I · Stop 1.1
marinera
piloto
actrizTHE GENDER
OF PEOPLEYou can read a crew nowthe word that changes its ending, the one that does not move, and the one that changes whole. Perico, for his part, mostly remembers that Barba paid four coins.
✓The article says he or she, the noun at timesIn the notebook · Sheets›
Your first custom. You will find them all in the Notebook, under Sheets.
Back to La Travesía
The seal
The stop closes in the logbook, and its rule is filed in your Notebook.
Press a Spanish form to hear it, in your device's own voice.
Stop 1.1, rebuilt here from the app's own screens. Nothing on them is written for this page: the scene, the rule, the game, the cards and the seal are the ones in the bundle.
The fourth screen is where the two halves of this page meet: the words the rule just taught become cards, and they enter the queue the moment you file them, not before. Perico carries 279 of them across the 96 stops.
The point
The app does not hold on to you.
What is not in here
no lives to refill
nothing to lose if you skip a day
nothing that runs out in the middle of a sentence
Come, do your reviews, leave. That is the whole contract.
Miss a week and nothing here makes you pay for it. Forgetting is part of the work: the card comes back on the right day, and putting it there is the engine's job, not yours.
Knowledge is a banquet.
I started learning Spanish for my girlfriend at the time. I wanted a dictionary in my pocket, real spaced repetition, cards I could write in ten seconds, a couple of games for the evenings with no courage left, and somewhere that told me honestly what was sticking. Every app did one piece of it. None of them did the whole thing, so I wrote the one that was missing.
I see knowledge as a banquet: you sit down, you take what you need, you leave the rest. Nobody remembers what they were made to swallow, and an app that force-feeds you will never get anything else.
Capitán OléMañana también existe.
Tomorrow exists too. Close the app.
Questions
The price, the level, and the method.
Is it really free?
Free to start, and that part does not expire: the story, the reviews, the Notebook, and a good share of the packs and the games. Premium opens the rest. There is nothing to buy today, because no payment is live yet.
Do I need to speak Spanish already?
No. You just read three sentences with nothing revised beforehand, and that is the entry level. The Notebook estimates where you are once it has something to go on.
What is spaced repetition, and why does it work?
A card comes back just before you would have lost it, at the moment recalling it costs a little effort, and that effort is what makes it stick. It is the principle Anki runs on, so if you already know Anki you already know the argument: the scheduler here is a newer one, and everything around it was built for a beginner learning Spanish rather than for a deck you assemble yourself.
Does it work offline?
The whole learning loop does: the story, the reviews, the games, the Notebook, and the voice that reads every card, all on the device. A plane, a metro, a six hour bus with one bar of signal, it does not care.
How is this different from Anki?
Anki is an empty box and a scheduler, and it is very good at both: you bring the deck. Here the deck is already written, with the gloss, the voice and the grammar note on every card, plus a story and 13 games around it. The scheduler is a newer one, FSRS, which Anki also offers. If you enjoy building decks, keep Anki. If you have downloaded three Spanish decks and finished none of them, that is the problem this app is.
¡Vamos!
Get an invite, do what is due, leave.
Free to start, and iPhone is the one that ships first.
The list
The app is not on the stores yet. The list is.
Leave an email and say which phone. iPhone invites go out by hand, in the order the list was written, and Apple caps how many testers a round can hold. There is no Android build yet, so that line is a queue, and nobody here is going to invent a date.
An invite opens everything Premium opens, and none of it is billed.
Sending…You are on the list. Barba has not been told.That does not look like an email address.That did not go through. Try again, or write to hello@spanish-pirates.com.
One email, one field, nothing sold.
This form needs JavaScript. Without it, write to hello@spanish-pirates.com with your phone in the subject line and you go on the list the same way.