Spanish 4: Your First 150 Words

A hundred and fifty words will not let you read a novel. They will let you say who you are, ask for what you want, count, name the day, and understand the small words that hold every sentence together. They are also enough to prove to yourself that remembering a language is a skill with a method, not a gift.

This piece is a deck: 150 Spanish words on cards, each with an example sentence, scheduled by a spaced-repetition algorithm so that every word comes back just before you would forget it. It explains how the deck was chosen, how the schedule works, and how to use it in ten minutes a day. Your progress is saved in your browser, shared with the trainers in the other Spanish pieces, and can be exported.

Your device has no Spanish voice, so the play buttons are hidden.

What is in the deck

The deck holds 150 words. They were chosen by judgement and checked against a published frequency list built from film and television subtitles: about four in five appear among its 1,000 most frequent entries (counting a verb if any common form of it does), and most of the rest are survival words (trece to diecinueve, the weekdays, pan, tienda). They are not the 150 most frequent words in order; they are the 150 you need to start saying things.

Group	Words	A few of them
Pronouns and people	8	yo, tú, usted, ella, nosotros
Little words	34	y, pero, que, de, en, con, muy, también
Question words	7	qué, quién, dónde, cuándo, cómo
Verbs	23	ser, estar, tener, ir, hacer, querer
Numbers 0 to 20	21	cero, uno, dos, diez, veinte
Days of the week	7	lunes, martes, sábado, domingo
Nouns	33	la casa, el agua, la comida, el día
Adjectives	17	bueno, malo, grande, pequeño, cansado

Notice what comes first: the small words and the verbs. In real speech, words like de, que, no and ser appear constantly, far more than any noun. That is the frequency idea from the first method piece, in practice: the words that appear most do the most work.

Each word becomes two cards

Each card has the Spanish, the English, an example sentence and, for nouns, the article, so you learn el or la with the word. Each word becomes two cards: Spanish to English first, then, once you have passed that, English to Spanish, which is harder and builds recall. The first direction is recognising; the second is producing, and producing is what you need when you speak.

On gender: nouns in -o are usually masculine and in -a feminine, with famous exceptions (el día, el problema, la mano). El agua is feminine too; it takes el only because a stressed a follows, and you still say el agua fría. Learning the article with the noun from the first day is far easier than trying to guess the gender later.

How the schedule works

The scheduler is a simplified SM-2, the algorithm behind many flashcard apps. See the card, try to recall, reveal, and grade yourself honestly: Again, Hard, Good or Easy. A first success returns after 1 day, then 3 days, then the gap is multiplied by an ease factor that starts at 2.5; Hard lowers it and Easy raises it. Again sends the card back four cards later. The buttons show the next gap.

Here is what a card looks like if you press Good every time it returns:

Time it appears	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th
Next gap, in days	1	3	8	20	50	125

Six good recalls take a word from today to a gap of about four months. Press Again once on the way and the card returns the same session, drops its ease a little, and starts the climb over with shorter steps. That is the whole mechanism: the effort goes where forgetting is closest, and you stop spending minutes on words you already know.

Using the deck well

• Say the answer first. Out loud, or in your head, before you press Show answer. Looking is not recalling.
• Grade honestly. If you hesitated or guessed, press Hard or Again. A flattering grade pushes the card too far away and you will pay for it later.
• Read the example. The sentence shows how the word behaves. Say it aloud; play it if you have a voice.
• Do the reviews first. New cards are the fun part, but the reviews are what the schedule depends on. Do not skip them on days you feel behind.
• Keep it small. Ten new cards a day is a good rate. If the deck feels heavy, drop to 5. A smaller habit beats a heroic start.

Making the words stick

The deck does the scheduling. Three small habits do the rest.

Use what English gives you. Many Spanish words resemble English ones because both borrowed from Latin: importante, familia, problema, restaurante. Treat these as free. But watch for false friends: embarazada means pregnant, not embarrassed; éxito means success, not exit; librería is a bookshop, not a library (biblioteca); actual means current. When a card looks too easy, check the example sentence.

Attach a word to something real. Say la casa when you look at your house, el agua when you pour a glass. Naming things in your own life gives the word a second route back into memory.

Meet the words again outside the deck. A word you have only seen on a card is fragile. Listen for the small words in any Spanish audio, even if you understand little; the next time a card comes up, you will already know the sound of it.

Saving and moving your progress

The deck saves to your browser on this device, in a record shared with the trainers in the other Spanish pieces. Clearing your browser data erases it, and a private window forgets everything when you close it. Export gives you a code to paste into a note; import restores it on this or another device.

Your first two weeks

Ten to twenty minutes a day, in this order: review the cards that are due, do one drill, then read or listen to something short. This table pulls the four Spanish pieces together.

Days	Deck	Drill	Outside the page
1 to 2	10 new cards a day	Pronounce it: every chip. Stress trainer: 15 words.	Read the vowel table aloud.
3 to 5	10 new, plus reviews	Trainer: regular verbs only; yo, tú, él.	Say your own name and where you live, out loud.
6 to 9	Reviews first, then 10 new	Trainer: add nosotros and ellos, then stem-changers. Ser or estar once.	Five minutes of beginner listening.
10 to 12	Reviews, then new	Trainer: add the yo-go verbs and the core irregulars.	Write five true sentences with tener, ser, estar, querer, ir.
13 to 14	Reviews only if you are behind	Trainer: everything you have, with vos or vosotros if they matter to you.	Take the quizzes. Export your progress.

Where to go next

• 🌐 Listening from scratch. Language Transfer’s Complete Spanish: a free audio course of short lessons, funded by optional donations, built around working the language out yourself.
• 🌐 Comprehensible input. Dreaming Spanish offers videos pitched for beginners, with visual support and slow speech. It has a free tier and a paid one; check the current limits.
• 🌐 The authority on the language. The Real Academia Española’s Diccionario de la lengua española, which also lists the full conjugation of each verb.
• 📘 A grammar to keep. John Butt, Carmen Benjamin and Antonia Moreira Rodríguez, A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (Routledge, 6th edition, 2019): a reference, not a course; look things up when a sentence puzzles you.
• 📘 A frequency dictionary. Mark Davies and Kathy Hayward Davies, A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2018), the most frequent words with example sentences.
• 📘 Graded readers. Short books for A1 and A2 learners, from publishers such as SGEL and Difusión, once you finish the deck. This path adds its own graded texts in its third stage.
• 🗣 A person. A paid tutor or a language-exchange partner, one session a week, as soon as you can say twenty sentences. No app replaces talking to someone.

What sticks

• The 150 words are the ones you need to start saying things: small words and verbs first.
• Each word is two cards: Spanish to English, then English to Spanish, which builds recall.
• Learn the article with every noun; nouns in -o and -a follow the pattern, with famous exceptions.
• The scheduler widens the gap after each success (1, 3, 8, 20 days and so on) and sends a miss back sooner.
• Say the answer before you look, grade honestly, and do the reviews before the new cards.
• Ten minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday. If the deck feels heavy, drop to five new cards.