The Stages of Learning Spanish: Exactly What to Study and When

I don’t know how good your Spanish is so far.

But, in this post, you’ll be able to place yourself on a spectrum – and then know exactly what to focus on in your stage of learning to maximize learning speed and minimize frustration.

And, at the end, I have a bonus for you that is so valuable that we almost charged for it as a separate product (but, we decided to give it to you for free).

There are four stages: survival, basic, intermediate, and advanced. Each one has their own challenges and different things that you should focus on.

Basic Stage

Before the Basic stage is “Survival” Spanish. This is nothing more than the handful of phrases found in any guidebook, like “where is the bathroom” or “chicken, please”.

Getting survival Spanish down just takes an afternoon (at most) of memorizing these phrases – there’s nothing really to it. So I’ll start by assuming you’re at least at a survival level.

At the end of this stage, you will be at a “hacked-conversational” level. Remember, we’re focusing on communication first, perfection later – so your teacher should correct a small percentage of your mistakes. A good teacher knows how to balance this, but for example, using the wrong gender should always be let slide at this point.

At a Basic stage, your main focus is on…

Pronunciation. Get this down early, please. It’s one thing that is not easy to unlearn later. You don’t need a near-native accent yet (we’ll get there later), but you should be able to say every word perfectly (or very close to it). You don’t need words or to even know what anything means to learn this. We’ll cover how to learn pronunciation two lessons from now.
Building the foundation of grammar. Without basic grammar, you have no way to communicate simple ideas. This includes the super basics like “I”, “you”, “the”, “it is a cat”, “dog > dogs”, “it is my dog”, but also certain conjugations/grammar concepts we’ll see in a second (like “voy a” and “tengo que”)
Enough vocab to give you words to learn the foundation of grammar with. Not a ton of focus on vocab here (meaning nouns, non-essential verbs, adjectives).
Learn the “window words”. These are the words I put on my window in the documentary – core words like before, after, under, and, but, if, so, that’s why, how do you say, and of course. These are “connectors” and prepositions, among other things.
You aren’t having many “conversations” at this point beyond speaking Spanish with your teacher (the examples and practice they present for learning). This is because without grammar building blocks, you can’t have real conversations – because you can’t form sentences. Thus, trying to have a full conversation is bad for your confidence at this point.
Learn the most common 30 or so verbs and how to conjugate them in the five most used forms.

What are the five most used forms?

At this stage, I recommend only learning a few conjugations. In order of importance:

Infinitive. This is what the verb looks like unconjugated. E.g. comer (to eat).
Simple Present. This is not what you are doing now, but rather something you (or I, he, she, etc) does in general. E.g. comes (you eat).
Progressive. This is the “-ing” conjugation. E.g. estoy comiendo (I’m eating). This is super easy.
Simple Past. There are multiple past tenses with slightly different meanings, but you don’t need to worry about those yet as you’ll get your point across with any of them. This is the easiest and most used. E.g. comiste (you ate).
Conditional. This is the “I would (verb)” conjugation. E.g. comería (she would eat).

Then, there are two very important grammar “hacks” that you will use a lot:

Voy a. This lets you skip learning the future tense completely until the advanced stages, as it means “I’m going to…”. All you do is conjugate the verb “ir” (to go), add an “a”, then the infinitive of any verb. For instance, “I’m going to eat” is “voy a comer”. “You’re going to eat”? “Vas a comer”.“I’m going to eat” is so close to “I will eat” that you can avoid all the extra work of learning another conjugation until much later.Just like that, you can skip hours of work memorizing another conjugation, while still being able to talk about the future.
Tengo que. This is the same structure as “voy a” in that you have the conjugation for “tener” (to have), then “que”, then the infinitive of any verb. It means “I have to…”. So, “I have to eat” is “tengo que comer”.

Like I said, I’m not going to teach you the actual grammar here (that would take awhile), as that’s the job of your teacher. But as far as what to focus on – studying these conjugations and focusing on these aspects is going to give you the most bang for your buck.

Add the relevant vocabulary for the topic, and you should be able to have a (not-so-pretty) conversation about almost anything with just what you learn in this stage.

In fact, in the next stage, Intermediate, we do exactly that: start to pile on the vocabulary. We also begin to clean up some of your mistakes, introduce the rest of the most used grammar, hone your accent, and start having lots of full conversations.

Let’s take a look.

Intermediate

Congratulations!

At this point, you have crossed the golden threshold from being rather hopeless, to actually being able to hack together conversations. You can now communicate!

At this point, you’re no longer worried that, “maybe I can’t actually learn Spanish”. You start to feel like you’re “getting it”.

And you are.

The intermediate stage is much longer than the basic stage. Through this stage, you’ll progress to being conversational (where I was at the end of the documentary) roughly halfway through. And when you cross over into the Advanced stage at the end of this stage, you’ll be conversationally-fluent (of course, per the 80/20 rule, this second half of the intermediate stage takes longer than the first half).

At this stage, your teacher will start correcting your basic mistakes, and generally “cleaning up” your Spanish. The better you get, the more they will correct your mistakes.

From the beginning of this stage to the end, you’ll progress from sounding like Tarzan (remember, reaching that point is a golden moment) to a fully functioning adult that stumbles over difficult sentences.

What are you focusing on here?

A lot more vocab. Now that you have the grammatical structure to use it with, it’s time to start adding a lot more vocab. This will expand your ability to use Spanish in many different situations faster than anything else now that you have the grammatical foundation.
Honing your accent. At the start of this stage, you should be able to pronounce every word perfectly. Now, it’s time to start trying to sound more local. This comes mostly through a process of mimicing people, but also from starting to speak faster and fluidly.
The remaining “core” grammar. You’ll want to cover things like the present perfect “I have eaten” (he comido) and the most common imperatives “take it please” (tomalo por favor). You’ll begin to use the subjunctive in specific situations (based on mimicking when your teacher uses it), but you won’t actually understand the full rules behind it yet.
Lots of conversations. Now that you can actually communicate, one-on-one conversations with people will become one of the most important parts of the entire process. In fact, more than 60-70% of your time will be spent just having conversations. This is primarily here to move all the grammar and vocab you are learning from “intellectual” to “second nature”. Remember, speaking is everything.

In addition to the things you need to learn, you’ll also start to care about slang and saying things like the locals do. This goes a long way in having people feel comfortable with you and forming deeper bonds. Your teacher should already be doing this on a somewhat region-neutral basis, as “textbook” Spanish is rarely how people actually speak to each other.

If you’re already living in a Spanish-speaking country, or know where you will be traveling/doing business in/etc, starting the process of learning the slang of that area will be one of the most fun parts of learning Spanish.

For instance, in Medellín, it’s very common to add “pues”(which technically means “well”, but is usually closer to “uhm” in Medellín) to sentences, even though it’s not “correct”.

Slang and street-Spanish changes from country to country, and often city to city, which is awesome. This isn’t necessary, but I definitely recommend giving it some time.

Once you’ve progressed through this stage (which will take a lot longer that the basic stage), you’ll move on to the Advanced stage.

Advanced

This stage is very simple.

You are already conversationally-fluent. You handle two hour conversations about the differences between German and Mexican culture, what you wish was different about your education, and laugh about something stupid that happened to a friend a few days ago, all without much difficulty.

You may still make some mistakes and run into difficult sentences that you butcher, but the conversation flows naturally. For the most part, you feel like you really speak Spanish now.

For most people, progression from this stage is erratic and slow, as they have already reached their goal.

Indeed, for most people, there is little reason to put in the amount of work that is necessary to progress from being conversationally-fluent, to actually speaking “perfect” Spanish, often about technical subjects.

But, if you are one of the ambitious individuals who wants to push forward, here’s what’s next.

The rest of the grammar. At this point, you have all of the most useful grammar, and are simply left with a lot of less used conjugations (some of which are almost never used), complex sentence structures, the subjunctive mood (which, at this point, you only know to a limited extent), and more. Basically, you need to learn whatever is left now that you already know the most used stuff.A good teacher and curriculum will help you select the most-used of the least-used, but even then you’re making incremental gains.
A shitload of vocab. Basically, you need the most used words for almost every subject, from car engines to kitchen utensils to types of fish. And of course, this is when you start to go really deep into the vocab for the subjects that you care about (you should already have a strong vocabulary in these subjects – this is when you fill it out).
The vast majority of your time will be spent in conversations. Luckily, this will point out to you the things you struggle with most and where you are lacking vocabulary. Also, since you already have a strong level, conversations will suddenly be just as fun as they would be in your native language.
At this point, your teacher should point out every last little stupid mistake you make. You’ll also want to request this of the people you speak with often. You’re after perfection at this point, after all.

Progress at this point is rather personal. Some people will start reading lots of books in Spanish and picking up vocab that way. Some will prefer TV shows or movies. Some people will listen to music or radio. Some will just have a lot of conversations and note down the words and grammar they don’t know as they go to cover later.

Once you are at this point, your teacher takes more of a support role than a central pillar role. You still will need them to explain the complicated grammar concepts you have coming up, some of which will be so ambiguous and confusing that even they, as a professional, have a hard time explaining. They will also push your limits much harder than your friends and other people you have conversations with, which is essential for faster growth.

The Perfect Spanish Curriculum Blueprint

OK, so now you understand the different stages of learning, have placed yourself on the spectrum, and know generally what you need to be focusing on.

But while “focus on the most used grammar and vocab” is good advice, and what you should do, how do you know which grammar and vocab is the most used?

The Perfect Spanish Curriculum Blueprint, that’s how.

This is, without a doubt, the most optimized curriculum for Spanish in existence. That’s not an overstatement. We’ve poured everything into this course: decades of combined experience, the curriculum I followed during the one month documentary, research study after study, and the lessons we’ve learned from running BaseLang.

We broke the language down and built it back up, finding the most important parts, ordering things in an ideal way for learning speed and understanding, all while following the Stages of Learning.

In all, we spent over a thousand hours building this.

I literally can not think of a single thing about it that could be better.

If you’re looking to learn at a screaming pace, following this curriculum plus the concepts in this course, along with a good teacher, are all you need.

I would have paid hundreds of dollars for this when I started learning Spanish, but we’re going to give it to you for free as a bonus here.

Click here to get it.

The blueprint even gives you access to our private Memrise flashcard decks so you can study the exact vocabulary recommended (of which each word is specifically selected based on usefulness), all for free.

Now remember, this is only for Shortcut to Conversational students, so please do not share it.

Click here to download the Perfect Spanish Curriculum Blueprint now.

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Sidenote: there’s a bunch of vocab in the curriculum, and tomorrow I’m going to share how you can memorize all of it easily, even if you don’t have time to study.