The Assimil series is a sort of special language-learning resource that I discuss in a blog post here. (Currently in English, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese)
Linguee is a lovely dictionary resource, in that it shows you multiple example sentences for each word and tells you about each word’s relative frequency in the language. RAE’s Diccionario de la Lengua Española is free and excellent. Once you learn enough Spanish, move to a monolingual dictionary. There’s a great, straightforward article on this at, with instructions for Macs and PCs. You’ll need to be able to type a few new characters (á, é, í, ó, ú, ü, ñ, ¿ and ¡). I’m a big fan of the Harry Potter series in translation, especially if you can find an audiobook version to listen to at the same time as reading. One of our Forum users told us that a list of its errors can be found here.)
(Note: Though I recommend the book, it does have some errors. There are a lot of options here so far, my pick would be Practical Spanish Grammar. They’re a nice resource to mine for useful content I’d suggest finishing the 625, then looking through them in order for new words or new grammatical constructions, and then learning those new chunks via New Word cards, New Word Form cards and Word Order cards. Online, you should be able to find neat set of sentences which are ranked based upon how frequently the words within those sentences show up within the language, then created Anki decks to store them, with Text-to-Speech recordings of each sentence and translations. You can also get a hold of Spanish Anki decks to improve your Spanish vocabulary, such as the Spanish alphabet, Spanish Top 2000 Words among many other flashcard decks. They’re not in frequency order, but that’s not a big deal you should know at least the top 1000 anyways. In terms of free resources, Wordsgalore has a decent list with translations of the top 1000 with mp3 recordings. They’re great for adding to your vocab once you get your first 1000 or 2000 words from a frequency list. The Mastering Vocabulary series is a wonderful set of books that contain core vocab for just about any field/topic you can think of. Get this at the beginning to direct your vocabulary work! The Routledge Frequency dictionary series is excellent, with example uses and everything. Later, when you’re ready for sentences, you can go back to your phrasebook and grab some. I’ve made a base vocabulary list of words to start you off! As I talk about in that article, I find it easiest to translate those words using the short dictionaries at the end of a Lonely Planet Phrasebook they’re cheap, short and give you good, standard translations for your words (just ignore the ridiculous pronunciation guides). You can even check out this Anki language learning blog for other Anki tips and tricks for learning Spanish. If you have more questions about Anki and learning Spanish, there’s also the Anki language learners community on Reddit. All of the other sounds in the language should be familiar to your ears and your mouth.(*note we’re looking for new resources here as ‘Pronounce it Perfectly in Spanish’ is now currently $200 used–if you run across a good alternative let us know!) I discuss them in the French vowel video, so at least until I make a video series on Spanish, just watch the French stuff and ignore the blabbering about nasal vowels, since you don’t need those. You’ll need to get rid of your English diphthongs for “o” and “e” (we don’t really say “o” we go “oh-uu”), and you’ll need a brighter “a.” All three of these issues show up in French, too.
There are basically only 5 of them: a ( az ah ar), e (v eh em ent e), i (d im it ir), o (b osc os o), u (c uc ur ucho). You’ll have a pretty easy time with the vowels. If you’re a native English speaker, you’ll need to learn to hear and pronounce these consonants: β (be bé), ɣ (tri go), ʝ (a yuno), x ( jamón), ʎ (po llo), ɲ (caba ña), r (ca rro), and ɾ (ca ro). There are also some useful Anki flashcards for Spanish to improve your pronunciation, such as the Spanish alphabet, Spanish IPA and other useful goodies. At the moment, our best recommendation is to use our trainers, but let us know if there’s an additional resource we can recommend and we’ll add it!) If you want to jump to free internet resources, check out the Spanish Pronunciation Wikibook, Wikipedia’s Spanish Phonology page and ’s pronunciation guide with recordings. (Note: The Spanish version of Pronounce It Perfectly appears to be out of print and very hard to get nowadays. The Pronounce it Perfectly series comes with Audio CDs, all the pronunciation rules, and I’ve yet to see one that wasn’t excellent. Once you understand that, start working on Spanish. First off, get a feel for how pronunciation works in English.