Spaced repetition for Spanish: cognates are cheap, false friends are not
Spanish gives English speakers an unusual starting position: part of the vocabulary is nearly free, and part of it is booby-trapped. Hospital, animal, importante, información cost you almost nothing. Embarazada, éxito and largo cost you a great deal, because you already hold a confident wrong answer.
A review system that treats all words the same wastes effort on the first group and under-serves the second. Spaced repetition, set up properly, does the opposite.
How fast do you forget a Spanish word?
Ebbinghaus established the baseline in 1885 and it still holds: roughly 70% of new material is gone within 24 hours, more than 75% within a week. Your brain discards what looks unnecessary, and a word seen once in a list looks exactly like that.
The counter-move is retrieval, spaced out. Review once today, then after 3 days, 7, 14, 30, 90. Each success stretches the next interval; each miss shortens it. Six short retrievals across three months beat ten repetitions in one evening, and cost less time overall.
Where Spanish changes the arithmetic
Cognates need fewer passes. Importante arrives already understood, so the only work is pronunciation. Letting the algorithm push these out quickly frees review time for words that actually block comprehension.
False friends need more. The wrong meaning is older and better established than the right one, and it resurfaces under pressure, which is to say while you are speaking. These deserve extra passes and an example sentence rather than a bare gloss. The high-frequency offenders are worth learning as a set.
Stress position belongs on the card. Límite, limite and limité are three different words. Learn the written accent and the sound together or relearn both later.
Recognition is not retrieval
Rereading a vocabulary list builds familiarity quickly, which feels like progress. Conversation asks for something else: the word, available in under a second, unprompted. Reaching for it before seeing the answer produces measurably stronger memory, an effect researchers call the testing effect, and it is the entire reason flashcards work.
Why this needs software
Several hundred words, each carrying its own next-review date, with cognates racing ahead and false friends held back. That ledger is unmanageable on paper after a fortnight. Spanish Progress keeps it, attaches audio to every card, and shows only what is due today, usually five minutes.
What has to be reviewed in pairs?
A few Spanish distinctions have no English equivalent, so there is nothing in your memory to attach them to. Reviewed one at a time they never settle, because the answer only makes sense against the other member of the pair.
- Ser and estar. Both are "to be". Es aburrido means he is boring, está aburrido means he is bored.
- Por and para. Both are "for". One gives the cause, the other the purpose.
- Saber and conocer. Both are "to know", one for facts and one for people and places.
- Preterite and imperfect. Both are the past, and English collapses them into one.
Put both members on the same card with a sentence for each, and ask which one fits rather than what the word means. A card with one answer teaches you a translation; a card with a choice teaches you the distinction, which is the part that fails in conversation.
Spanish lets you review with your ears
Because Spanish spelling and sound match almost perfectly, a card can work in audio alone: hear the word, produce the meaning. That is unusual. In English or French an audio card and a written card teach different things, so you end up reviewing each word twice.
Use it. Review while walking or driving, with the prompt spoken rather than shown. It costs no extra study time and it builds the skill that written cards never touch, which is recognising a word at conversational speed rather than at reading speed.
One warning: pick one accent and stay with it while a word is still new. Spain's z and Latin America's s are different sounds for the same letter, and a word bouncing between the two in early reviews takes far longer to settle.
How many cards per Spanish verb?
Spanish verbs carry the person in the ending, so a single verb produces dozens of forms. Make a card for each and a deck of three hundred verbs becomes unmanageable inside a month.
Cut it to the tenses that carry ordinary speech: present, preterite, imperfect. Those three cover most of what you will hear. The subjunctive comes later and only for the twenty or so verbs where it appears daily. Keep every form inside a short sentence rather than alone, because fui al cine teaches the form and its use at once, while a conjugation table on a single card has no correct answer and cannot be graded.
Sources
- Henry L. Roediger III & Jeffrey D. Karpicke, Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention, Psychological Science 17(3), 2006, pp. 249-255.
- Hermann Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885), English translation, Classics in the History of Psychology, York University.
Spanish Progress keeps the review ledger. You bring the 5 minutes.
