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This is a canonical question / Esta es una pregunta canónica

This is a specifically created Community Wiki which gathers resources for learning Spanish and it has been approved by the Community itself.

Alphabetical Index

Click the links to visit the specific section with the resources.

Section description
Audio pronunciation
Corpora
Courses Set of courses to take online
Dictionaries (online) Stand-alone or dictionary files for you to use on your computer.
Dictionaries (hard-back or paper-back)
How to learn Spanish
Lists of words
Mobile apps
Podcasts
Television Netflix
Thesauri
Websites
Writing
Other reference resources

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16 Answers 16

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Dictionaries (online)

Dictionaries by the Real Academia Española (RAE)

Monolingual Spanish dictionaries

Regional monolingual dictionaries

Bilingual dictionaries

  • Lexico (Oxford) choose Spanish-English or English-Spanish in the dropdown

Specialized dictionaries

Other dictionaries

  • Nuevo tesoro lexicográfico de la lengua española (NTLLE), a dictionary of dictionaries (both monolingual and bilingual) that compiles a wide selection of works that define the lexical heritage of the Spanish language, and covering the last 500 years.

  • Mapa de diccionarios. Check simultaneously six editions from the academic dictionary (editions 1780, 1817, 1884, 1925, 1992 and 2001).

  • Iedra. An "inverse dictionary" where you can find a Spanish word provided that you know its meaning.

  • Goodrae. An alternative interface to RAE's online dictionary (DLE) that let you search by lemma and turned every word into a clickable link to the corresponding definition, in a time when the DLE didn't (this functionality has long since been implemented in the DLE too). Goodrae also functions as an inverse dictionary.

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Audio pronunciation

  • Forvo contains thousands of Spanish words pronounced by natives.
  • The Google translator can read aloud any Spanish phrase you type in, with a synthesized voice, as well as attempting to do machine translations.
  • eSpeak is a free, open source tool (must be installed locally) to convert text to speech. The voice is rather mechanical, but it can also be made to produce reasonably accurate IPA transcriptions.
  • RhinoSpike connects you with native speakers of Spanish (and many other languages) who will record your requested text as audio. In exchange, you do the same for those learning your native language.
  • YouTube lets you change the speed at which videos play, a feature that can be used to practice your listening. Quoting julodnik: "You can set the speed to 50% of the normal speed, the pitch of the voice remains unchanged. I try to get familiar with the speech at that speed and then increase the speed gradually until reaching normal speed."
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Television

Source Country Description
Corporación de Radio y Televisión Española Spain State-owned public corporation that assumed the indirect management of the Spanish public radio and television service (RTVE). Its web site hosts several Spanish channels being broadcasted live (including La1, La2, Clan, 24h and Teledeporte), and lots of contents on demand (series, documentaries, cartoons and others, for all ages).
Historia de nuestro cine Spain Spanish films with an introduction by experts.
Pluto.tv -
Plex.tv - Free films online
Atresplayer  Spain Atresmedia's service for both live and on-demand streaming of its contents (including the Spanish channels Antena3 and laSexta).
Mitele Spain Mediaset España's service for both live and on-demand streaming of its contents (including the Spanish channels Tele5 and cuatro).

Regional

I you are interested in listening to the way people speak Spanish in the different regions search for the public TV internet streaming for each country. Some examples:

Not regionally specific

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  • A good series produced by RTVE (Spain) is Águila Roja. It is notable among other programmes on their website as all 9 series are available and is good viewing for adults and children alike. Generally, RTVE is good for learning spanish because a full transcript is available along with the programme.
    – camarones95
    Commented Jan 17, 2019 at 20:46
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Mobile apps

All of them are free.

App versions  Description
Diccionario de la lengua española
by RAE and ASALE		 - Android
- iOS
Duolingo - Android
- iOS
- Windows Phone		 app to help you learn Spanish with game-like lessons
Anki
(similar a Memrise)		 se basa en tarjetas que contienen una palabra/expresión/oración en un idioma y su traducción a otro idioma. La frecuencia con la que te sale cada tarjeta depende de tu facilidad para memorizarla, que tú seleccionas una vez destapas la tarjeta. De esta manera practicas las palabras que te cuestan más. Para saber más, consulta esta respuesta.
Speed Spanish - Android app with multiple tools and games to help user's learn Spanish, including: Dictionary, translator, conjugator, lessons & multiplayer games. Developed by Kes Walker
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    Highly recommend Anki, it is one of my favorite flashcard apps.
    – greg
    Commented Jun 20, 2023 at 21:49
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Podcasts

  • Radio Ambulante - 2014 winner of the Gabriel García Márquez Prize for Innovation in Journalism. Distributed by National Public Radio (US), tells Latin American stories through audio, but the site includes transcripts and translations.

  • A la aventura - High quality audio. The podcasts are categorized as Classics, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Humor, Young Readers, Nonfiction, Romance, Theater, or Thriller. Lisa has written about it here.

  • Duolingo Spanish Podcasts - True stories for English speakers learning Spanish. Fascinating real-life stories in easy-to-understand Spanish with English narration. These are not language lessons; they’re life lessons through language.

Teaching Podcasts

  • Notes in Spanish - Free podcasts by a Madrileñan and Englishman at Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced levels. Site has many other features, e.g. links to videos, reports, and books. Note, Beginner level valuable for Intermediate students also.

  • Coffee Break Spanish - Part of the Radio Lingua Network which produces a number of different podcasts. A list of them is here. You can also buy lessons, the first of which is free.

  • LightSpeed Spanish - Four levels (Beginners, Early Intermediate, Advanced Intermediate, and Advanced). Viewers also have the option of watching a YouTube video instead. (They're the same as the podcast for the most part.)

  • Doorway to Mexico - The first one is free. After that, $49 to listen to other podcasts in the collection. The site also offers a breakdown of the vocabulary and bonus content. Plus, it prides itself on exposing you to the "real" way people speak (even if it may not be grammatically correct). Lisa's additional comments may be found here.

  • List of 23 different Spanish podcasts - includes, for example, "Accelerated Spanish," by Timothy Moser, who claims that his list of six words will give you 10% coverage of the language. (His style and approach might not appeal to everyone.)

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  • I notice that your code is a bit different than what I've previously been using -- [title](url). You use the brackets and then add another set of brackets with a numeral and then add a link at the bottom. I was going to do the same thing, but I kind of see this as a work in progress that's probably still very much in its nascent stages. Doesn't it complicate the process by adding numbering so early on? I'm not trying to be rude. I'm just genuinely curious.
    – Lisa Beck
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 7:02
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    Some time ago, in a related question, somebody listed few interesting podcasts. See them in Free online resources for beginner course and feel free to add those you think are good enough :)
    – fedorqui
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 10:16
  • @walen Very interesting. So it would seem that this is then a choice of some convenience rather than a coding protocol that programmers try to adhere to. Let's say it's just easier for a person to do the bracket+parentheses combo. Will there be any problems in a post that contains mixed coding methods?
    – Lisa Beck
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 22:40
  • @fedorqui Thank you for the link. I'll definitely take a look at it. And thanks for adding a section on podcasts. This is a really great resource that I think is sometimes underutilized by beginning learners of Spanish and it's something that could really improve their oral comprehension skills, one of the hardest things to develop while learning a foreign language.
    – Lisa Beck
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 22:42
  • @LisaBeck - Thanks for the additions. To match with the style of the rest of this page I'm doing some trimming. If there's something you feel needs to be restored, though, please do.
    – aparente001
    Commented Mar 28, 2018 at 2:44
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Thesauri

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Other reference resources

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How to learn Spanish

  • https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com: a question and answer site within the StackExchange family, intended "for students, teachers, polyglots, and anyone interested in the techniques of second-language acquisition."

  • the growing body of Q&As here at Spanish Language! You can search by a tag you're interested in, such as .

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Websites

  • Duolingo is a website (as well as an app for both Android and iOS) that allows you to learn Spanish (and many other languages) in just 5 minutes a day with game-like lessons.

  • elcastellano.org is a website about the Spanish language in general.

  • NachoTime is a website for students trying to get out of Spanish Intermediate Purgatory (maintained by nachocab).

  • Memrise is a website (as well as an app for both Android and iOS) for Spanish learners. You can learn Spanish (and many other languages) by using flashcards.

  • Quizlet is a website where you can make study sets (or find study sets created by other users) of Spanish (or anything) terms. Quizlet offers several games where you can compete against users across the internet. It also has a flash card mode and a test mode.

  • Destinos. An audiovisual course that exposes students to conversations in Spanish, while following a story line.

  • Anki. Free, spaced repetition system. It comes in a desktop version and mobile versions. Once you download it you can get free decks of the most common words or useful sentences.

  • Castellano Actual is a blog with articles and answers about the Spanish language and especially the Peruvian dialect.

  • Prutzkow - Online number translator into English, Spanish, German, Russian, Finnish.

  • Word of The Hour - A website that features one basic vocabulary word every hour along with crowd-sourced Spanish language translations. Translations are crowd-sourced by community members on Reddit.

  • Spanish Academy - Website with lessons online for beginners. The website also offer 1-on-1 classes with native spanish teachers.

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  • Technically, a lot of what is on here could be considered a website of some sort. What about changing the title of this section to "Language Learning Platforms," keeping Duolingo on it, but then also adding sites that also fall into this category? There's probably even enough of the type that would be considered interactive language learning platforms with some amount of "gaming aspect" or point system to them. Span¡shD!ct comes to mind, but there's likely to be many others. Gamified or not, there's Babbel, LingQ, Lingualia, Digital Dialects, et cetera.
    – Lisa Beck
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 0:11
  • Then you've got sites that are geared more toward conversation (e.g., Conversation Exchange, Hellolingo), and others that are good for getting help with writing practice (e.g., The Mixxer). Many sites offer multiple features. For example, Conversation Exchange is mainly for helping people text via chat or make arrangements to chat via voice, but its mail message features make it great for writing corrections (bolding, italicizing, changing colors, ...).
    – Lisa Beck
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 0:12
  • I suppose a separate category could be created for those and/or some sort of matrix with various features (e.g., chat/conversation, grammar, teachers, free, gamified, et cetera) could be created. Sites like Memrise, Quizlet, and Anki probably deserve their own separate section since these have one thing in common -- they're flashcard sites. Destinos (and Extra) along with others of this type also probably deserve a category of their own. elcastellano.org seems to defy description, so it might be a good choice for a "Multiple Features" category.
    – Lisa Beck
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 0:14
  • NachoTime is basically a blog, which would also make for a good category because there's a lot of blogs on the Spanish language out there. I don't recommend making categories for beginning, intermediate, and advanced because those definitions are somewhat nebulous, shifting, and not always apparent or applicable, but if you know for a fact that a site is geared more toward a particular level, subdivisions within the larger main categories or even just annotated and then sorted within categories as such might be useful to those who come to this page.
    – Lisa Beck
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 0:15
  • @LisaBeck - The beauty of SE is that you can propose a reworking by editing, but it can be rolled back. If you still feel doubtful, though, why not post a draft reworking at Meta?
    – aparente001
    Commented Mar 29, 2018 at 4:19
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Lists of words

Links to files containing lists of Spanish words, to use in applications or whatever:

  • List with around 80K Spanish words, excluding variations of number, genre and verb conjugation (i.e. "famoso" is included, but not "famosa", "famosos" or "famosas")
  • Spanish Frequency Lists Compiled at Wiktionary - almost 20 different lists here. Includes a list of the 2,000 most frequent Spanish nouns.
  • 500 Most Common Verbs - Each verb links to a WordReference entry. Site includes 25 different quizzes.
  • 50 most difficult Spanish words to pronounce - Pair this with a Memrise course of your own design and some audio recordings from Forvo and you'll master these in no time.
  • EsPal - Online corpus of Spanish words with associated word-properties. You can search for words with given properties, or upload a list of words and return their properties. Results can be downloaded as .txt (maximum 10,000 results per search).
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Corpora

Document  Author Dates Description
Corpes XXI RAE 2001 → 2012 A corpus of the written Spanish.
CREA
Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual		 RAE 1975 → 2004 A corpus of the written Spanish.
CORDE
Corpus Diacrónico del Español		 RAE its beginnings → 1974 A corpus of the written Spanish.
CNDHE
Corpus del Nuevo Diccionario Histórico del Español		  RAE 12th century → today The corpus used for building the NDHE, 400 million entries. Allows searching for terms that frequently appear together.
Hemeroteca Digital de la Biblioteca Nacional de España Biblioteca Nacional de España 1683 → today Most of the publications are free to use although many of the most recent ones can only be seen from the library facilities due to copyright restrictions. The texts are completely OCR-scanned and are searchable through its search engine.
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Videos

Videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and elsewhere will be found in this section. This post will contain general interest videos or videos that would fall under the category of entertainment — not feature length films (see the Film section for that), television series (see the Television category for that), documentaries, or what would be considered educational programming (see the Documentaries/Educational Programming category for these last two types).

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Dictionaries (paper)

  • Diccionario de uso del español. María Moliner. Available in online book stores (ahem Am ahem azon ahem) in both book and DVD formats.
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Writing

If you want to practice your Spanish writing you could do so on r/WriteStreakES

WriteStreakES is a community where you can write a short text every day and native speakers will correct it for you and tell you what is wrong and why. You can choose your own topic or you can write about fun topics proposed by the moderators every day.

In the same way there is r/SpeakStreakES where you record an audio daily and native speakers will correct you. (Note to moderators: if this falls into another category please feel free to delete it and move it there. I didn't see where to put it)

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Courses

Course level description
FSI Spanish Basic Course Starter to high level It consists of four volumes comprising a total of 60 lessons that include hundreds of drills, speaking exercises, texts for reading practice, and many hours of audio recordings for perfecting your pronunciation.
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