Spanish for English speakers

The points where Spanish and English disagree hard enough that you get them wrong by default — and being told once saves a hundred small failures.

These are not a course in Spanish grammar, which is a book. They are the specific places where your English is actively working against you: where translating what you would say in English produces a sentence that is wrong, or worse, produces one that is right but means something else.

Every rule here comes with minimal pairs — the same words, the distinction visible — because a rule you cannot hear the effect of is a rule you will forget. All of it is drilled in the app, free and without an account.

ser, estar, tener and hayFour ways Spanish says what English says with "to be" and "to have". Gender, agreement and word orderWhy "la problema" and "un rojo coche" mark you out, and how to stop saying them. Verbs that do not behave like Englishgustar runs backwards, the ending is the pronoun, and two verbs mean "to know". The two past tenses, por vs para, and the subjunctiveThe four things that separate getting by from being fluent. The small words that give you awayDouble negatives, muy against mucho, question marks, accents, and words that lie. Pronunciation: ten sounds that matterWhat your mouth does instead of a rolled r, a Spanish j, an ñ — and how to fix each one.

How to use these

Read one. Not all of them — one, the one covering the mistake you know you make. Then go and produce twenty sentences that use it, out loud, and get them corrected. Reading a rule and being able to apply it under time pressure are separated by exactly that work, and nothing else substitutes for it.

That is what the app is for: it holds a conversation with you, corrects what you say, names the rule you broke, and schedules the sentence to come back days later so you have to produce the fix from memory.

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