Improve Your Spanish With These Hand-selected Spanish Anki Decks

So, you've already learned the basics of Spanish (or maybe you haven't) and now you've come face to face with the realization that you need to memorize thousands of Spanish words? You're looking for a way to learn all those phrases and nouns and maybe even a bit of medical Spanish or something niche like that, and hopefully never forget them?

Well! If I didn't know better, I'd say that it looks like you're looking for some Spanish flashcard decks. Funny enough, I've just gone through like ~200 free Spanish Anki decks.

Here are the 6 best ones I found (plus a bonus):

[Setup] What Anki is, how to install the app, and how to download Spanish Anki decks

On the off-chance that you just heard about this Anki thing on Reddit or YouTube and don't really know what it is beyond the fact that it's supposedly The Way, here's a quick crash course in what you need to do before you'll be able to get started.

What is Anki and this so-called "spaced repetition"?

Anki is an app for making digital flashcards and training with them. What's special about it is that it uses what's called a spaced-repetition algorithm in order to figure out when the ideal time to review your old flashcards is. There are really just three things you need to know about Anki:

We've actually got an entire post dedicated to how spaced repetition (Anki's backbone) works, so if you'd like to learn more about this wonderful witchcraft, go take a detour to check that out.

How to install Anki

For detailed instructions about how to install Anki, see this post. Otherwise:

Lastly, you'll want to sign up for an account on the Anki website, and you're all set!

How to install Spanish decks from Ankiweb

First, find a deck that looks solid on the "Anki Shared Decks" page. (You may need to be logged into your AnkiWeb account to access this page.)

Once you find a deck that looks solid, click "Download":

Now open Anki, click "Import File", find the deck you downloaded (it will end in .apkg), and open it with Anki:

You should now see the deck in your desktop Anki program. To transfer it to your mobile app, sync the desktop app to AnkiWeb—again, you'll need to be logged in—then open your mobile Anki app and click "synchronize":

This final step could take a chunk of time, depending on the size of the deck you've selected. Once it's done, though, your (not so) secret language learning weapon will be loaded and ready to go.

Which leads me to...

[Soapbox] The best Anki deck for people who want to learn Spanish shall...

So, I just called Anki a loaded weapon. I meant that, and I wasn't just being a lazy writer who didn't want to take seven seconds to think of a more unique description.

You see, Anki is only as helpful as the stuff you're committing to memory with it. For example:

Basically, use some common sense here. Make sure that the stuff you're learning is actually of practical use to you.

Or, to put it more bluntly:

Alas:

[Golden Rules] Ideally, the Spanish deck that you invest your time in should:

This is, admittedly, a pretty steep request. To write this blog post, I looked through nearly 200 decks that were either hosted on AnkiWeb or recommended by Reddit. I was hoping to find one obvious Super Ultimate Spanish Deck™ that I could dub "🏆 the best Spanish flashcard deck, period 🏆" and thus get away with writing a really, really short blog post.

Well, I didn't find one single deck that met all of the criteria of a "great" deck. If you can find a deck like that, ignore all of my recommendations and use that deck. That's an awesome deck.

Otherwise, here are some other options that I consider serviceable:

1. A deck for beginners that are feeling a bit overwhelmed

So, small caveat here. I unfortunately didn't find a deck that I could happily recommend to absolute beginners. With that in mind, assuming that you want to use Anki and you don't want to pay for decks, my suggestion is to start with Spanish Frequency Core Vocabulary 1–50.

This deck will teach you the most common 50 Spanish vocabulary words—things like this, no, and the. I don't usually recommend using vocabulary decks (decks that teach words in isolation), but I'm willing to bend on that rule for your first few dozen words. After all, it can be overwhelming to jump right into sentences, and you need to know some words before you can start making sentences.

Once you finish that deck, move onto either Basic European Spanish Sentences or Basic Latin American Spanish Sentences:

This deck also breaks some of my Golden Rules because each sentence contains multiple unknown words and it asks you to produce information, instead of just focusing on understanding Spanish... but I'm willing to let that slide by. All of the words this deck features are super super super common, come with great audio, and include pretty detailed notes that provide important information about usage.

You'll unfortunately only know 100–150 words after finishing both of these decks, but they're essential words that will give you the solid foundation you need to take the next step with your Spanish learning. (Which, if you're taking this post as a guide, would be one of the decks in part 6).

2. A deck of Spanish sentences organized by vocabulary frequency

We talked about the importance of vocabulary frequency in another blog post. I highly recommend you read it. It's short. While about Japanese, the principles it explains apply to every language. In brief:

And with that, I present A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish:

What the deck has going for it is that it presents 5,000 Spanish words that are organized according to how common they were, and each word includes a relevant example sentence. The downsides are that the deck doesn't have any audio and that the example sentences often are not appropriate, given the difficulty of their target word. See in the picture that the example sentence for "to be" includes "first-person narrative" and "protagonist". Those are totally different leagues of vocabulary.

Anyway:

3. A deck to practice Spanish conjugations

Spanish verbs conjugate, meaning that whereas English says I talk and you talk, Spanish says yo hablo and tú hablas. In other words, the end of Spanish verbs change depending on who is doing the verb. When you do the math of 16 tenses with ~6 conjugations per tense, then add in the dictionary form and participles, you end up with an absolutely terrifying statement: every Spanish verb comes with nearly 100 different forms.

Thankfully, some guy on the internet put a lot of time into Ultimate Spanish Conjugation (Lisardo's KOFI Method). It's kind of awesome.

The idea is that while Spanish verbs are pretty complex, they're also quite regular: a handful of exceptions (irregular verbs) aside, the exact same conjugation patterns get applied to all verbs with the same dictionary form ending (-ar, -er, -ir). If you learn the conjugations of ~70 carefully selected verbs verb well, you'll be able to effortlessly conjugate any of the thousands of Spanish verbs you might run into.

I don't personally think that beginners need to spend there time on something like this, as you'll pick up many of the patterns naturally by consuming Spanish content— first-person singular ("I") forms tend to end in an -o, first-person plural ("we") forms tend to include an -m; stuff like that—but it's an awesome resource for a more advanced learner who is beginning to think about outputting (speaking and writing) and finding that they're a bit shaky with their verbs.

While this deck isn't for everyone, I wholeheartedly recommend it to the niche group of people that are ready to benefit from it.

4. A deck to study Spanish pronunciation

Spanish isn't a language that's infamous for having difficult pronunciation: its words sound like they look they should sound, and it doesn't have many sounds that are difficult to make for native English speakers. Nevertheless, the gringo accent is a thing. If you take a peek at Wikipedia's Spanish Phonology page, you might just conclude that Spanish pronunciation isn't quite as easy as it's made out to be... and you'd be right.

That's where Learn to read Spanish 🇪🇸 - The Spanish writing system comes into play:

The deck is pretty straightforward:

There's a lot of scary terminology to get into if you want to really study pronunciation, but this deck does a good job of presenting the main takeaways in an easily-digestible format.

5. The ultimate Spanish deck for intermediate learners

A big part of the difficulty involved in creating a high-quality deck is the simple fact that everybody has different levels and interests. You could make an incredible flashcard deck for someone interested in telenovelas that currently knows 2,600 words, and that same deck wouldn't be super useful for somebody who wants to read Gabriel García Marquéz in the original but currently knows 500 words. Their goals and knowledge gaps are just too different.

Doing so allows you to ensure that sentences in your deck are level-appropriate (because you'll only make cards out of sentences that are accessible to you, naturally) and related to your interests (because their content comes directly from media you find engaging).

Now, you can create flashcards on Anki. We've just looked at a bunch of flashcards made by other people, so I'm not going to tell you not to use Anki. I would, however, like to let you know that one of Migaku's core focuses is on automating the process of making good (and good-looking) flashcards. We're pretty good at it.

For example, below you can see me watching a video from Curiosamente on why we age in my phone's YouTube application.

I stumbled into a new word, dañino (damaging/harmful), so I tapped it to see a definition. That word seemed like it would be useful to know, and it was the only word I didn't know in the sentence, so I clicked the orange button to send it to Migaku's flashcard creator.

Below is the result—from start to finish, the whole process of looking up what dañino meant and creating this flashcard took just a few seconds.

Anyway:

6. A deck with audio from native Spanish speakers

Naturally, if you want to understand Spanish as spoken by people from Spanish-speaking countries, it's important that you actually spend time listening to real Spanish. Furthermore, most of your listening time should come from interacting with the language in an organic fashion, as discussed above.

But for people who aren't quite ready to dive into the deep end just yet,two of the shared decks on AnkiWeb contain decent sentences with audio from a native Spanish speaker.

Deck one: 9000 Spanish sentences - difficulty sorted with native audio

This deck is pretty solid. Its kind of like a frequency deck, but instead of focusing on a single target word, each sentence gets a difficulty rating according to the frequency of all the words it contains. If you follow these instructions to reorganize the deck according to that difficulty rating, you'll have a deck that I feel pretty good about recommending. I would personally follow these instructions to turn them from "Cloze Deletion" flashcards to "basic" flashcards, which will remove the fill-in-the-blank on the front, too

Deck two: WordBrewery Core Spanish: real sentences and native audio

This deck is a bit different. Its cards are not organized by difficulty or frequency, but, rather, every sentence is built from only super common words. This, combined with native audio, makes it a pretty good choice for an upper-beginner who wants juuuuust a little more practice with the basics.

7. A deck to practice Spanish listening comprehension 

The final deck that caught my eye is Spanish 7000 Intermediate/Advanced Sentences w/ Audio:

This deck is quite different than everything we've seen so far. The front of the each card contains nothing but Spanish audio (from a decent TTS; not a human, unfortunately). The back of the card contains the Spanish sentence and an English translation. The sentences are not organized by frequency, but each one focuses on one of Spanish's ~top 4,000 vocabulary words, so you won't see anything that doesn't have a good shot of showing up in any typical daily conversation.

While this deck isn't something I'd suggest to people as a standalone recommendation, I do think it could be of some use to people with a solid intermediate level who have neglected their listening skills and want a low-stress way to start building them up.

Remember that the Spanish language is more than just cards with example sentences! 

Spanish learners, in parting, I'd like to bestow upon you one final Golden Rule:

It takes time to learn a language to any meaningful level. The good news is that a lot of fluency is really just a byproduct of having spent a lot of time doing things you find personally enjoyable in Spanish. If you get hooked on a Spanish book, movie, or creator, and then just keep going from there, a lot of problems will solve themselves.

Good luck with your learning journey ✌️