Learn Spanish by reading.

The best way to learn Spanish is to read authentic Spanish daily with instant tap-to-translate, learning the most frequent words first and reinforcing them with spaced repetition. Spanish spelling is highly phonetic, so reading real texts quickly builds both vocabulary and pronunciation.
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Lector reading a Spanish passage with colour-coded word states and click-to-translate
Native speakers
~485–500 million
Difficulty (FSI)
Category I
To proficiency
~600 hours
Why Spanish

Reasons to start.

01

The world's second-most-spoken native language — nearly 500 million native speakers and around 600 million total (Instituto Cervantes).

02

Official in 20+ countries across Spain and Latin America, and hugely useful for travel, business, and community life in the US.

03

Highly phonetic spelling — words are pronounced as they're written — which makes reading approachable from early on.

Bonus: Closely related to Portuguese and Italian (often partly understandable) and shares many Latin-derived cognates with English; knowing Spanish makes other Romance languages far easier.

Is it hard? How long?

The honest version.

FSI Category I (~600 hours), one of the easiest languages for English speakers. Spelling is highly phonetic and grammar is regular; verb conjugations and the subjunctive mood are the main learning curve.
Whatever the category, the method is the same: read a lot of Spanish, learn the most common words first, and let a spaced-repetition system resurface them right before you forget. See the method .
A line of Spanish

Por la tarde, la familia se reúne en la plaza para hablar, tomar café y ver a los niños jugar bajo los árboles.

In the afternoon, the family gathers in the square to talk, drink coffee, and watch the children play under the trees.

How Lector helps

Read it. Practice it. Remember it.

The reader (above) turns any Spanish text into a lesson — tap any word to translate it, hear it in a native voice, and track what you know. Then frequency-ordered cloze practice locks the core vocabulary in, and mined words push straight to Anki.
Practice

Drill the words that matter first.

Frequency-ordered cloze sentences build the core of Spanish vocabulary, scheduled by spaced repetition so each one returns right when you're about to forget it — in multiple-choice or typing mode. Practise listening to native pronunciation on every word and sentence, powered by Google text-to-speech.
Spanish cloze practice in Lector with multiple-choice options
Free resources

Free resources to get you started.

The Spanish reference data and Anki decks below are free to download and use on their own. To turn them into a full reading course, self-host Lector for free or start on the cloud from $5/mo.

Spanish reference data

Frequency lists and Anki decks built from open corpora — free to download and use.

Browse the data

New to Anki?

A from-scratch guide to spaced-repetition flashcards and loading your first Spanish deck.

Getting started with Anki
Questions

Learning Spanish, answered.

More on the method, or jump into the docs.
Get involved

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Come chat with other learners on our Discord — swap resources, compare progress, ask questions, and stay motivated while you read your way in.
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Start reading Spanish today.

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