50 Basic Spanish Words and Phrases to Learn for Beginners (2024)

FAQs

What are the top 100 Spanish words? ›

2,500 words constitute those that should enable you to express everything you could possibly want to say, albeit often via awkward circumlocutions. 5,000 words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers without higher education.

If you want to find the best way to learn Spanish fast, immersion is the way to go. The most important thing that immersion provides is a constant stream of your target language. You will hear it all the time and read it everywhere.

There is no set order to learning the language. There is a certain natural order in which you will pick things up, but that does not mean you should learn them in that order. A common criticism of courses is that they are too rigid and structured in their approach.

Besides being an amazing country with beautiful and mesmerizing places to visit and enjoy, Colombia is also considered to have one of the clearest and easiest Spanish accents to learn and understand.

Euskara (Basque)

Euskara is easily the most unusual language of Spain — and an unusual language for Europe as well, since it doesn't fit in the Indo-European family of languages that includes Spanish as well as French, English and the other Romance and Germanic languages.

If you think about native-level fluency, you'll need to master between 20,000 and 40,000 words, and as you can see the margin is quite large. If you want to have a basic conversation, experts say that you'll just need around 3,000 words.

The Spanish Alphabet: Sounds And Letters

The table above includes the four extra letters that are often included in the Spanish alphabet: ch, ll, ñ and rr.

What is the easiest language to learn? ›

If you start out as a beginner and manage to spend an average of 1 hour per day working on your Spanish, you should be able to reach conversational fluency within 8 – 12 months. That translates to about 250 – 350 hours spent. But remember that consistency is key here.

Native speakers have a vocabulary of up to 20,000 words. With this many words, a learner can do anything. Read, write, speak about anything they want.

No, gracias

This is the standard way of saying “no” when offered something. It's also the most polite option. No, gracias means “No, thank you” in Spanish, and it's used in the same way as in English.

8. Simón (Okay, Yes, Sure)

If you want to say “zero” in Spanish you would use “el cero”. It's part of the 0-10 sequence you may already know: cero, uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez. The numbers in Spanish follow a pattern, just like in English.

A good starting place for beginners is to drill the 100 most commonly used words until you can write, speak and comprehend them without effort. One way to encounter these on a regular basis is also to change your phone language to Spanish (or whichever language you're trying to learn).

Spanish is one of the most popular languages in the world and can be studied quickly with just 30 minutes of focused practice each day.

Beginner Spanish Level A1

A1 is the basic level and where you begin to develop your communication skills in the language with basic vocabulary.

What part of Spanish should I learn first? ›

Alphabet. The Spanish alphabet is one of those subjects that you must master first when learning this language. It is quite simple to remember, and it is very important to master it in order to have good spelling. he Spanish alphabet, often called “Abecedario,” is made up of twenty-seven letters.

Immersion. Immersion is hands down the best way to learn Spanish. It is the fastest and most effective way to become fluent. If you have the opportunity to learn Spanish while living or traveling to a Spanish speaking country, do it!

Some people talk about dormant or passive bilingualism, but there is nothing passive in understanding a language. Your brain works at full speed to process foreign sounds and give them meaning. So, when you can understand and read Spanish but cannot speak it, you're receptively bilingual.

Chilean Spanish accent

Spanish from Chile is famously different from the standard version. There are a lot of Chilean words that you won't find in RAE canon. For this reason, some people call “Chileno” the hardest version of Spanish to learn. It's also known to have unclear pronunciations.

In this lesson, we learned the vocabulary and pronunciation for the numbers 1-10 in Spanish: uno (ooh-no), dos (dohs), tres (trays), cuatro (kwah-troh), cinco (seen-koh), seis (says), siete (syay-tay), ocho (oh-choh), nueve (nway-vay), diez (dyays).

This article describes some of the longest words in the Spanish language. Esternocleidooccipitomastoideos (31 letters) is the plural of the noun esternocleidooccipitomastoideo, which is the sternocleidomastoid, a muscle in the human neck.

Basically, Spanish is a lovely and perfectly phonetic language. English, on the other hand, is VERY hard to read, pronounce, and write. Spanish has 25 phonemes; it's generally agreed that English has 44 phonemes. (Phonemes are speech sounds.) So it's generally harder for a Spanish speaker to pronounce English well.

Pronouncing the longest word in Spanish isn't for the faint of heart. In fact, any native speaker would have some problems trying to pronounce this word! To give you even more tools to tackle this monster of a letter, let's break it down into syllables: e-lec-tro-en-ce-fa-lo-gra-fis-ta.

Mucho Gusto

It can be used in the beginning and the end of the conversation. Instead of saying “adios” to someone who you just met, you can simply say “mucho gusto!” And if you are wondering how to respond to “mucho gusto”, the best answer is “igualmente” o “mucho gusto también”.

What does mucho gusto? ›

Quick Answer. Mucho gusto. = Nice to meet you. / Pleased to meet you. / It's a pleasure to meet you. examples. Mucho gusto.

When someone asks you ¿Cómo estás? If you feel alright, you say estoy bien; you could also say, estoy muy bien, to give more emphasis, which means “very good” or “very well.” You can also add one extra word, gracias, meaning “thanks”, and estoy bien, gracias; it means “I'm fine, thank you.” 2.

Known as the “purest” form of Spanish, the Castilian accent specifically stems from Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla Leon, two autonomous communities in Spain; however, the Castilian accent is one that is spoken by those who live throughout Spain.

In the 14th century, Castilian was named as the official dialect of Spain. It is the most widely known and spoken of all dialects in the world. Today, Castilian Spanish consider as the most proper, purest dialect and original form of Spanish. It is also very easy to understand.

It states that in most areas in life, roughly 20% of the input is responsible for 80% of the output. The same rule can be applied to language learning and teaching.

According to an FSI study, i.e. the Foreign Service Institute, it should take a new learner approximately 600 classroom hours to achieve conversational fluency in Spanish. They also suggest an approximate 1:1 ratio between the time spent independently studying Spanish and the time spent in a classroom.

It is possible to learn Spanish in 3 months, but it is true that to fully master the language to a native level, you will need more time. An intensive Spanish course covering all levels (from A1 to C2) consists of 62 weeks (about 15 months in total).

The letter h is always silent in Spanish, wherever it is in a word. The only exception is when you find it together with the letter c. The ch sound is pronounced as it is in English.

The letters k and w do not occur in Spanish words unless the word has been borrowed from another language such as English or even Japanese. For example, el karate is considered a “Spanish” noun, even though the k is not a Spanish letter.

But in 1994, the Spanish Royal Academy eliminated the LL and CH from the Spanish language alphabet. They made this change to make Spanish more computer and keyboard friendly. This change also streamlines the Spanish alphabet. After all, it's two less letters!

What are 23 letter Spanish words? ›

The 23-letter adverb anticonstitucionalmente means 'anticonstitutionally'. Anticonstitucionalmente is also the Portuguese translation; the French translation, anticonstitutionnellement, is an exceptionally long word as well (25 letters).

How many words do you need to speak Spanish? According to some research, around 2,000 words are enough for a learner to understand more than 80% of the conversation. As for the written language, have in mind that sentences are more complex, and vocabulary is diverse.

In 2010, the Royal Spanish Academy officially removed two letters (ch and ll) from the alphabet, making it 27 letters instead of 29. Fortunately for English speakers, the official Spanish alphabet now only has the one additional letter that does not appear in the English alphabet: ñ.

The number 35 in Spanish is número treinta y cinco. This is the cardinal number, often called a counting number.

The letters k and w do not occur in Spanish words unless the word has been borrowed from another language such as English or even Japanese. For example, el karate is considered a “Spanish” noun, even though the k is not a Spanish letter.

Here are the Spanish numbers: 1 - uno. 2 - dos. 3 - tres.

If you think about native-level fluency, you'll need to master between 20,000 and 40,000 words, and as you can see the margin is quite large. If you want to have a basic conversation, experts say that you'll just need around 3,000 words.

When you reach the A1 level, you will have a rough working vocabulary of about 700 words. Some will be derivatives (“run” and “running”), some you will be able to recall quickly and others only slowly and with a lot of effort, but it's a good ballpark number.

How minutes is 5,000 words? 5,000 words is 33.33 minutes of speaking time.