Why conjugation is the smartest place to begin

You might be wondering whether verbs are really where you should put your energy. Maybe an app told you to memorise colours and animals first. Let me make the case plainly: conjugation is the engine of the whole language.

In Spanish, a single verb isn't one word — it's a small family of them. Hablar ("to speak") becomes hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, hablábamos, hablaré, hablé, hablaría… Each form quietly tells the listener who is doing it and when. Get this, and you can build real sentences about real life. Skip it, and you're left pointing at words and hoping.

Here's the part most people get backwards: you don't need a huge vocabulary to start speaking. You need a handful of common verbs you can actually conjugate. A person who knows 50 verbs cold — in the right tenses, for the right people — will out-communicate someone who's memorised 2,000 nouns and can't string them together. Verbs are the highest-leverage thing you can learn. That's why we start here.

Why free flashcards beat the paid apps

The colourful subscription apps are good at one thing: keeping you opening the app. Streaks, gems, little fanfares. That's not an accident — their business is your daily engagement, not your fluency. You can tap through them for a year and still freeze the moment a real conversation starts.

Flashcards plus a smart scheduler optimise for something completely different: what you can actually recall, days and weeks later, without a hint. No gimmicks. Just your memory, measured honestly, and trained at exactly the right moments. It's the method quietly used by medical students, polyglots, and serious language learners the world over — because it works.

• Free, and free forever. No subscription, no paywalled lessons, no "upgrade to continue."
• Yours to keep. The deck lives on your device. No company can switch it off or change the deal.
• Works offline. On a plane, on the metro, in a dead-signal café — it just works.
• Built for memory, not for streaks. Every review is timed to fight forgetting, not to sell you gems.
• Real audio on every card. You learn the sound from the start, not a robotic approximation.

I'm not against paying for things that are worth it. I'm against paying a monthly fee for slower results. This deck is my gift to you — and I've poured enough care into it that, honestly, I'd stand it next to anything on the market.

What even is a flashcard?

At its simplest: a card with a question on the front and the answer on the back. You look at the front, try to answer from memory, then flip it to check. That tiny moment of effort — reaching for the answer before you see it — is the whole secret. Scientists call it active recall, and it's one of the most powerful learning tools ever measured.

Reading something feels productive but fades fast. Pulling it out of your own head, even when it's hard, is what carves it into long-term memory. Here — try it. Read the front, guess the meaning, then tap the card to flip it:

That's it. That's a flashcard. Did you feel that little "wait… got it!"? That spark is your memory doing a rep. Do enough reps, spaced out over time, and the word stops being something you "study" and becomes something you simply know.

Spaced repetition, and an app called Anki

One flashcard is nice. But you'll have thousands, and here's the obvious problem: which ones do you review, and when? Reviewing a word you already know cold is a waste. Forgetting one completely before you see it again is also a waste. The sweet spot is to meet each card right as you're about to forget it — that's the moment a review does the most good.

That idea is called spaced repetition. A card you find easy gets pushed further into the future; a card you fumble comes back soon. Over time, well-known cards drift to weeks, then months apart, while shaky ones stay close — so you spend your minutes only where they matter.

Doing that math by hand for thousands of cards is impossible. So we use Anki — a free, open-source flashcard app that handles all of it for you. It's been refined for over a decade and is the gold standard for serious learners. You press one of two buttons after each card; Anki schedules the rest.

FSRS — the best scheduling algorithm there is

Anki's superpower is the algorithm that decides when each card comes back. For decades that job was done by an older formula (SM-2) — clever for its time, but it treats everyone the same and never really learns who you are.

The modern engine is called FSRS — the Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler. It's a machine-learning model that studies your own review history and builds a personal map of how your memory fades. Then it schedules every card at the precise moment that keeps it in your head for the least possible effort.

• It adapts to you. Nineteen finely-tuned parameters, optimised on how you actually remember — not an average stranger.
• It's state of the art. Built on the latest spaced-repetition research and tested across the review histories of thousands of learners.
• It keeps up with you. It weighs your recent reviews more heavily, so as your habits change, it changes with you.
• It's the future of Anki. It's so much better than the old system that it's slated to become Anki's default.

You don't need to understand the math. You just need to switch it on and let it run — and I'll show you exactly how in the best-settings section. The short version: turn on FSRS, and you're using the most effective memory tool ever shipped in a free app.

What's inside the deck

This isn't a thrown-together word list. Every card was placed on purpose, in an order designed so you never hit a cliff. Here's the shape of it:

• Frequency-ordered verbs. You learn ser, estar, tener, ir, hacer… first — the ones you'll use in your very first conversations.
• A spoken example for every form. Each verb form lives inside a real, natural sentence you actually hear, not an abstract table.
• Audio, baked in. Spanish and English, recorded into the deck so it sounds identical on every device, even offline.
• Vocabulary woven through. 200 high-frequency words are sprinkled in as you go, so you're always picking up something useful.
• A calm motivation layer. Quiet milestones mark your progress, and a little Spanish refrán (proverb) appears now and then as a gift — never cheesy, just encouraging.
• A reference panel on every answer. Under each verb you'll find its pattern, its cousins, and traps to watch for — there to help, never to test you.

How it teaches — the "no-cliff" philosophy

Most conjugation resources drill hard from card one and bury you in exceptions. People quit not because they're incapable, but because it stops feeling possible. This deck is built on the opposite belief: you should always feel progress, and never feel abandoned.

• One new thing at a time. Each card adds a single new idea on top of what you've already got — a new person, or a new tense, or one new irregular form. Never all at once.
• Always in context. You see and hear a real sentence, picture yourself in it, then produce the verb. Meaning first, mechanics second.
• The notes are a safety net, not a quiz. The panel under each answer is there like a friendly note in the margin. You're never expected to recall it.
• Two-button simplicity. Mostly you'll only touch Again and Good. No agonising over grades — just honest yes/no, and the deck loops back for anything shaky.

Let's read a real card together

Here is an actual card from the deck — the workhorse type, called a conjugation card. This is the front: it sets a scene, tells you the tense, and asks you to produce one Spanish verb form. Read it, decide your answer out loud, then press Show answer — exactly like you will in Anki.

Notice what just happened. You didn't need to "already know the present tense." The card told you everything: when it's happening, who's doing it, and the verb to shape. You just supplied the form. Here's what each piece is doing:

The deck has a few other friendly card types too — quick vocabulary cards (recognise a word, and later produce it), short tense lessons, and recap cards that let you feel a verb click into place. Here's a vocabulary one. Many Spanish words are near-identical to English — try this, then flip:

See? You already knew that one. The deck opens with dozens of these "free" words to build momentum before the real conjugation work begins.

Get started

Three steps. Take them in order and you'll be reviewing your first cards in a few minutes. Here's the whole journey before we begin:

The best settings, step by step

Anki works out of the box — but with a few deliberate settings it goes from good to genuinely the best learning setup money can't buy. I know a long settings list can be tempting to skip. Please don't. You only do this once, and it's the difference between forgetting half of what you study and remembering almost all of it. Ten minutes now buys you months of efficient learning. Let's go.

Walk through it with me

Three habits that keep it humming

Once you're studying, three small things keep FSRS accurate and your memory strong:

• Use the buttons honestly. Again = I didn't get it. Good = I got it. Hard is still a pass — use it only when you got it right but it was a real struggle, never as a softer "Again." Misusing Hard quietly wrecks your scheduling. For this deck, you'll happily live on Again and Good.
• Click "Optimize" about once a month. It re-tunes FSRS to how you've been learning lately. Thirty seconds, big payoff.
• Don't loop a card over and over in one sitting. If something won't stick today, mark Again and move on — it'll come back. Drilling the same card ten times in five minutes confuses the scheduler and doesn't help you remember.

Your daily five minutes

This is the easy part — the part that lasts. Open the deck, and for each card:

• Say your answers out loud. The audio is there so you can copy a real voice — use it. Speaking is the whole point.
• Don't chase perfection on day one. Mark Again freely. The sequence loops back; nothing is lost.
• Want to hear it again? Press R on desktop (or the ⋮ menu on mobile) to replay the audio as often as you like.
• A card in your way today? Bury it (the − key, or the ⋮ menu) to set it aside until tomorrow.
• A card you'll truly never need? Suspend it from the ⋮ menu to retire it for good (you can always bring it back). In one line: bury is "not now," suspend is "not ever — for now."

Five to fifteen minutes a day. That's the entire commitment. Trust the sequence, press the space bar, and let the algorithm carry the timing. Consistency beats intensity every single time — poco a poco se anda lejos.

Help me make it even better

I built this because I wanted it to exist — a calm, free, genuinely good way in to Spanish. But it gets better when people like you tell me what's working and what isn't. Hit a rough card? Wish a verb were in there? Spotted a typo, or have an idea that would've helped you on day one?

Please reach out. I read everything, and real feedback from real learners is exactly how the next version gets sharper.

And if it helps you — pass it on

There's someone in your life staring down a wall of conjugation tables right now, half-ready to give up. This could be the thing that keeps them going. Sharing it costs you nothing and might change someone's whole relationship with the language.

License & credits

Cadence is released under CC BY-SA 4.0 — you're free to use it, share it, and even adapt it, as long as you credit the source and pass on the same freedom to others. It's built on open conjugation data and runs on the wonderful, open-source Anki. Made with care, and given freely.