What is the best app for learning the Spanish language?

Spanish, along with other originally European languages like Italian, French or Portuguese, the linguistic beginnings of Spanish establish it as a Romance language. Spanish is, particularly in the bilingual regions of Spain, also called as Castellano (Castilian), due to its derivations in the territory of Castilla. It is the third most spoken language next to Mandarin Chinese and English in the entire world. It is the world’s second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese, and the world’s fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi. Alongside English and French, it is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout the world. With about 400,000,000 native speakers all over the globe, it is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and it is also used as an official language by the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Union of South American Nations, the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States, the African Union and many other international organizations.

Duolingo

Duolingo Website | iOS | Android

Price: Free

Duolingo has the highest ratings of all—it won the Best App Award in 2013 in both the AppStore and the Google Play Store. Duolingo Spanish is split up into units that have a certain theme (e.g. education, work, medicine), and it’s designed so that each unit goes up in difficulty. It’s very unique in the fact that it’s not grammar intensive—as a matter of fact, apart from about 10 of the most commonly used tenses, you won’t see any grammar lessons throughout the app. Their units are generally divided into two types: tenses and others (e.g. nouns, adjectives, adverbs, question words, pronouns, etc.) and within each of these units, there are sub-units. Each sub-unit covers about seven to 10 words. Each unit can have anywhere from one to 10 sub-units. There are about 20 questions per sub-unit. Inside each sub-unit, there are six types of exercises that teach you these words, building on what you already know: the voice recording, where you read a Spanish sentence out loud after hearing a native recording, English to Spanish translation of a phrase, Spanish to English translation of a phrase, matching a photo to a word, rearranging words to form a sentence and multiple-choice questions.

Duolingo was designed to be quick to use, so it uses a very focused approach to distil lessons down to the bare essentials.  What that means is if you can commit about 20 minutes of time every day to go through three to four lessons, you’ll be able to finish all the lessons in about three to four months’ time (taking into account word loss over time). There are also some really cool additional features as well—like setting a daily “track” to measure progress, word loss meter, Duolingo’s virtual currency (lingots) store, etc. Recently, they’ve also added the Duolingo stories feature which allows you to practice your Spanish comprehension with engaging short stories. Your points from the Duolingo story feature go towards your XP!

Overall, Duolingo really manages to teach Spanish in a simple way by honing in on the 1500 most important words that are most commonly used in daily situations all while making it seem like a fun little game.

Spanish usually falls in the “easy list” of English speakers, due to the innumerable cognates. In fact, if you’ve already learnt any Romance Language previously, Spanish becomes easier to learn. It’s not that the Spanish grammar is comparatively easier than the others because it actually poses its own challenges, especially the subjunctive part, but a natural flow in Spanish comes only with time. Sometimes you can just Hispanicize English words and just get away with it.

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