Anki for Spanish: which decks, how to handle conjugation, and a daily pace

To use Anki for Spanish, start with a frequency deck, the most common words first, each with an example sentence and audio, and add 10 to 20 new words a day. Once the first few hundred words are familiar, add a sentence deck. Handle conjugation with fill-in-the-blank (cloze) cards in sentences rather than a card for every form of every verb. Anki's default settings are a fine place to start.

Start with a frequency deck

The top of a Spanish frequency list is mostly grammar words and the most common verbs: de, que, el, ser, estar, tener. Learning them first means every later sentence has fewer unknown words. The 100 most common Spanish words shows the top of one such list.

Many frequency decks on AnkiWeb are built from Mark Davies' A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish (Routledge), which ranks 5,000 words. Refold sells a Spanish 1K deck on its own site. Best Anki decks covers where to find decks and how to judge one. For Spanish, check for:

• Frequency order, not alphabetical or by topic.
• An example sentence on every card. Que, se and lo each have several uses, and the sentence shows which one is meant.
• The article with every noun: el libro, la mesa. Gender is part of the word.
• Native audio, in the accent you want to learn (see below).

Add sentences after a few hundred words

Word cards build vocabulary quickly. Sentence cards teach what they can't: word order, agreement, and verb forms in use. A common point to add them is once the most common few hundred words are familiar, so the sentences aren't full of unknowns. Two formats are common:

• English to Spanish. You read the English and say the Spanish sentence. Slow and hard, and the closest to speaking.
• Spanish with a word blanked out (cloze). You fill in the missing word. Faster, and it tests one word in context.

Sentence cards vs word cards and cloze deletion flashcards cover both.

Conjugation in Anki

A Spanish verb changes with person, number, tense and mood. Anki users handle that in three main ways:

1. Cloze cards in sentences. The sentence has the verb blanked out, with the infinitive as a hint: Ayer yo ___ (comer) en casa. The answer is comí. This tests choosing the right form, which is what speaking needs, and it's the most common approach.
2. A card per form. One card for each person in each tense. It grows fast: six forms in three tenses for 50 verbs is 900 cards, most of them regular forms you could work out from a rule.
3. Rules from a book, irregulars in Anki. Learn the regular endings from a grammar resource, and make cards only for irregular verbs and forms, such as ser, ir, tener and hacer in the preterite.

Many learners combine the first and third. Whichever you choose, add one tense at a time: the present first, then the preterite and imperfect. How to learn Spanish verb conjugation has more on cloze cards and on rating a missed accent.

Vosotros

Spain uses vosotros for "you all" in informal speech; Latin America uses ustedes instead. Many decks include vosotros forms. If you're learning Latin American Spanish, you'll want to recognise them, but you can suspend cards that drill producing them.

Audio

Spanish spelling is a good guide to pronunciation, so audio matters less for reading than it does in English or French. It still matters for listening, and for accent. Spain and Latin America sound different: in most of Spain, z and c before e or i are said like English "th", while in Latin America they're said like s. Pick a deck whose audio matches the Spanish you want to understand. Say each word or sentence aloud with the recording.

How many new words a day

10 to 20 is the usual range. Many common Spanish words are cognates for English speakers (hospital, animal, posible), which makes them quick to learn. Watch for false friends: embarazada means pregnant, and actual means current. Anki's manual says 20 new cards a day leads to about 200 reviews a day.

That's how long it takes to see each card once; reviews continue after. How many new cards per day in Anki explains how to choose, and Anki maximum reviews per day covers the review limit.

Settings

The defaults suit a Spanish deck: learning steps of 1m 10m, a 10-minute relearning step and 200 maximum reviews a day. If you add English-to-Spanish cards for the same words, turn on sibling burying so both directions don't come up on the same day. If you use FSRS, leave desired retention at 90%. The best Anki settings for language learning goes through each one.

Common pitfalls

• Nouns without their article. You'll know the word but not whether it's el or la.
• Conjugation tables turned into cards. Hundreds of cards for regular forms a rule already covers.
• Sentence decks too early. Sentences full of unknown words fail over and over.
• Pressing Hard when you forgot. Hard counts as a pass. See Hard vs Again.
• Too many new cards in the first month. The reviews arrive weeks later. If they pile up, pause new cards until they settle.

On iPhone

Decks, the app this site is for, has Spanish decks in its library: Spanish Frequency 5000, Beginner Spanish Sentences (English first, Latin American Spanish, with native audio), Spanish Conjugation (over 4,000 cloze cards) and Spanish 9000 Sentences. It can't open Anki decks or .apkg files, and it's iPhone only.