v1.0 — Spanish conjugation, finally built for English speakers
The first release of Cadence Conjugations ES: a focused conjugation deck, and the app made to study it. Here’s what it is, why it exists, and how to get the most from it.
Why I built this
When I started learning Spanish, I was lost — and for a long while I couldn’t even say why. Part of it was that Spanish didn’t feel like learning English; there was simply more to it. The bigger part was that no one was talking about that difference. Schools, teachers, apps — they all just had me grinding, while I sat there genuinely curious about what was going on underneath.
Conjugations were where that curiosity caught fire. I wanted to master them. I kept asking my instructors how, and they never really had an answer — they’d just teach me more conjugations. The curiosity never died, so I set out to learn conjugation on my own, because doing it is genuinely liberating: it’s the moment you can build a sentence, play with the grammar, and feel the language finally click.
But finding a roadmap was painfully hard. Opening a verb’s full conjugation table online was a nightmare — learning every form of a single word felt unfair, like a game you can’t win. I’m sure there are great books out there, but in an age of software and the internet, I felt there had to be a smarter way.
I tried the popular apps. I watched friends keep years-long streaks and still not be able to speak — it became clear those apps are built to keep you engaged, not to get you speaking as fast as possible. So I turned to the open-source community, and honestly, it helped enormously. But it had its own road bumps: too many tools and no idea which to choose, and once I found a good one, I had a new problem I never wanted — learning the tool. It took me months to get the best out of it, and even then something kept telling me there had to be a tool that simply clicks — one that isn’t a problem to learn, but helps you learn the language. The resources I could find weren’t built for English speakers either.
After about a year of this, I decided to build the tool and the resources I wish I’d had — for new Spanish learners coming from English.
What’s in the deck
Conjugation matters, but you can’t let it swallow your time and fall behind on actually speaking. So the deck is curated around that balance:
- The 100 most-used Spanish verbs — more than enough to carry everyday conversation, and it gets easier fast after the first handful.
- Only the tenses that earn their place — the ones that carry everyday Spanish — while deliberately leaving out the ones that only confuse you when you’re new.
- Real sentences you’ll actually use, drilled in the hard, useful direction: you read the English and produce the Spanish, then flip to check. Spanish→English is easy; turning English into Spanish is what speaking demands — so that’s what you practice.
- Ordered to teach patterns, not tables. Once you know a few verbs, the move from yo to tú to él in a tense becomes a pattern you can feel. Grinding a conjugation table misses that and gives a false sense of progress — so the later cards interleave the forms, keeping your daily reviews on the new pattern you need instead of just piling on more cards.
- Most-frequent first, difficulty rising gradually. The deck front-loads the most common — and most irregular — verbs, so even your first handful moves your Spanish noticeably.
- A motivation layer built right into the cards, to carry you through the steep early stretch.
- Text-to-speech in both English and Spanish. Hearing each prompt and answer spoken is a real part of learning, so every example sentence is voiced in both languages — you train your ear while you train your recall.
The app
Good cards are one thing; studying them well is another — and with today’s information overload, a clear method is hard to find. So Cadence comes with the software too, built to get out of your way:
- Mobile-first — the tool you always have on you, always within reach.
- Swipe to study, with card animations that make each swipe feel like the progress you’re making. I spent real time on that feel, because it matters.
- Expert settings, already configured. It’s built on spaced repetition — the proven way to remember things for the long term — and tuned the way an expert would set it up, so there’s nothing for you to configure. Just start.
- No account to begin. It opens as a free demo right away; sign in with Google when you want your progress saved to your own Google Drive and synced across your phone and laptop.
- A daily streak to help you keep the habit.
How to get the most out of it
Start, and be consistent — that’s genuinely most of it. Even the first couple of weeks will move you, and it only compounds from there. And if it helps you, pass it to a friend who needs it.
I wish I’d had this when I was starting out. I’m just glad I get to hand it to you now.