The best app to learn Spanish words in 2026

What makes Spanish words tricky

• Gender. el problema, la mano: learn every noun with its article.
• ser and estar. The difference shows only in real sentences.
• False friends. embarazada does not mean embarrassed.
• Fast speech. Words you can read are often hard to catch by ear.

1. NewLexi

Add Spanish words from a photo, a text, a song, Anki or Quizlet, or generate a set on any topic or straight for an exam. Each word gets spaced repetition and comes back in stories and dialogues at your level with audio, so you hear real Spanish and see gender, ser and estar in context. Grammar lessons, a writing trainer with AI feedback and a game layer are in the same daily plan.

• Best for: travel, a move to Spain or Latin America, DELE, work.
• Free: spaced repetition of all your words, translator and import, no ads.

2. Anki

Flexible flashcards with shared Spanish decks. You build the context yourself; the iOS app is paid.

• Best for: learners who like to tune everything.

→ NewLexi vs Anki in detail

3. Quizlet

Ready-made Spanish sets for classes and textbooks. Good for cramming, weaker for long-term memory.

• Best for: school and university classes.

→ NewLexi vs Quizlet in detail

4. Duolingo

The most popular Spanish course. Builds a habit, but you cannot add your own words, and the free version has ads and limits.

• Best for: beginners.

→ NewLexi vs Duolingo in detail

5. Babbel

Structured Spanish lessons by experts. Only the first lesson is free.

• Best for: a classic course.

→ NewLexi vs Babbel in detail

How to remember Spanish words for good: 9 tips that work

1. Add only as many new words as you can review. With spaced repetition, daily reviews settle at about 5–10 times your daily new words. 10 new words a day means roughly 50–100 reviews, about 15–20 minutes. If reviews take longer, add fewer new words for a few days instead of skipping reviews.
2. Choose words for your goal, not from a random list. A word you will not meet in the next month is likely to fade. Learn the vocabulary of your exam, your job or the series you watch, and save the rest for later.
3. Use endings to guess the gender. Words in -ción, -sión, -dad, -tad and -tud are feminine (la canción, la ciudad), while many words in -ma that come from Greek are masculine: el problema, el tema, el idioma. Still learn each noun with el or la, but these patterns cut the guesswork.
4. Learn a word together with its neighbours. Write down the phrase where you met the word, not the word alone. Native speakers say “tomar una decisión”, not “hacer una decisión”, and you only learn that from real combinations.
5. Recall first, then check. Before you flip a card, say the answer out loud or in your head. Trying to recall strengthens memory far more than reading the answer again (Karpicke and Roediger, 2008), even when the attempt fails.
6. Make your own sentence about your life. Words you use in a sentence you made up yourself are remembered better than words you only read (the generation effect). “Tengo que tomar una decisión sobre mi piso” sticks better than an example from a dictionary.
7. Meet each word about ten times in different texts. Research suggests it takes around ten encounters for a word to settle in (Webb, 2007). Flashcards give you some of them; the rest should come from reading and listening.
8. Read texts where you know 98% of the words. At that level you can understand a text without a dictionary and guess the new words from context (Hu and Nation, 2000). A text where every fifth word is new is tiring and teaches less.
9. Do not learn similar words on the same day. Words from one tight group, such as all the colours or left and right, get mixed up when you learn them together (Tinkham, 1993). Spread them over several days and learn words by topic instead.

In NewLexi most of this happens on its own: the daily plan keeps the balance of new words and reviews, every card asks you to recall before showing the answer, stories and dialogues from your words are written just for you at your level so you meet them again and again, and the writing trainer checks the sentences you make up.

Preparing for DELE? Read how many words you need for DELE B1 and B2.

Sources

1. Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
2. Anki Manual. docs.ankiweb.net
3. Quizlet. quizlet.com
4. Duolingo. www.duolingo.com
5. Memrise. www.memrise.com
6. Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968. doi.org/10.1126/science.1152408
7. Slamecka, N. J., & Graf, P. (1978). The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 592–604. doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.4.6.592
8. Webb, S. (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 28(1), 46–65. doi.org/10.1093/applin/aml048
9. Hu, M., & Nation, I. S. P. (2000). Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1), 403–430. nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/item/253
10. Tinkham, T. (1993). The effect of semantic clustering on the learning of second language vocabulary. System, 21(3), 371–380. doi.org/10.1016/0346-251X(93)90027-E
11. Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213–238. doi.org/10.2307/3587951