Want to turn your flashcard practice into real speaking skills?
Let’s go over 6 tips for using flashcards to become fluent in Spanish. These are the same evidence-based learning techniques that have helped thousands of our students become so fluent, some of them even do full interviews in unscripted Spanish. They all used flashcards to help them get there, and here’s how.
By the end of this video, you’ll know exactly how to turn your flashcard routine into real-world Spanish fluency. These six tips are simple, powerful, and proven to work—even if you’re short on time.
You don’t just want to know Spanish in your head, you want to speak it fluently.
That means practicing the physical skill of speaking Spanish. Sure, knowing Spanish is important, but saying Spanish phrases out loud requires practicing with your mouth — the muscle memory of saying as much Spanish as possible.
Flashcards are a great opportunity for this. Whenever you're going through your Spanish flashcards, every time you look at the Spanish word or phrase on the card, you should say that Spanish out loud. Doing this means you’re drilling the skill you’re actually trying to get better at, which is actually speaking Spanish.
It’s going to take hundreds of hours of speaking Spanish out loud for you to find your Spanish flowing in a way that’s fast and natural. So start clocking those hours now, using your flashcards to quiz out loud with your mouth, not just your mind. Your Spanish muscle memory will start developing really fast.
Your flashcards probably have English on one side, Spanish on the other.
That’s great, but when you review, look at the English side first and then try to guess the Spanish from the English, not the other way around.
Here’s why this is crucial. If you’re a native English speaker, your thoughts are currently occurring in English. However, our goal is to think in Spanish, not English. The fastest path to thinking in Spanish is to redirect your English thoughts into Spanish. That’s what you’re practicing when you read an English sentence and mentally translate it into Spanish.
A lot of students do the opposite: They instead start with Spanish and try to guess the English. This is going to train your brain to do something you don’t want: Every time you see a Spanish word, you'll think about the English version of that word. We want to flip that around. By training yourself to start with the English and then come up with the Spanish, you'll have an easy time redirecting your thoughts to be in Spanish instead of English all the time.
For example, let’s say one of your flashcards reads: “I can’t go to the place.” This is your opportunity to train your brain to think of the Spanish version of phrase: No puedo ir al lugar.
Inconsistency is the number one reason that flashcards don't work for students.
When you’re learning a new language, consistent daily exposure to what you're working on is the only thing that's going to move you forward. All the other advice in this guide depends on you drilling your Spanish skills on a consistent basis.
If you haven't yet made a daily ritual out of working on Spanish, consider taking our Spanish in One Month Challenge. This is a Spanish grammar bootcamp that’ll get you practicing all these things consistently for a whole month, including with daily flashcards. That momentum will set you up for a lifetime of fluency.
This is one of the superpowers of flashcards — you get to randomize them! This is a great way to prepare yourself for real life, where you can never really predict what words or phrases you're going to need. Shuffling your cards means practicing Spanish in a spontaneous and unexpected way.
Now, you won’t always feel like it’s productive to do this. When you’re studying, there's a temptation to work on just one thing at a time or one category of things at a time. Maybe you first study your conjugations of Ir, then study your direct object pronouns, then practice sentences that use possessive pronouns like mis, tus, and sus. However, research shows that shuffling your study is better for long-term learning.
Here’s an example of how you might do that. Let's say you're working on memorizing the conjugations of Ir, and you have about 10 flashcards that use lots of different forms of Ir. Work on these until they're almost easy for you, but not quite. Then stop yourself. Shuffle those Ir cards into a bunch of your other flashcards, especially other verbs that you’re practicing, and then go through the stack of flashcards and see how well you do.
Research shows that this is helpful in multiple ways. Of course, it helps simulate real life, where you never really know which verb you’re going to need. But it also actually leads to better long term retention of what you're studying, because it makes it just enough of a mental challenge that it sticks much better.
A lot of Spanish flashcards have just one word or a very short phrase on them. That’s useful for learning the tiny, bite-sized pieces of the language, but it's not enough to bring you to real fluency.
In real life Spanish conversations, you'll be using entire sentences. The best way to practice for this is to make a habit of inventing Spanish sentences from your flashcards. Don't just recite one word at a time or one phrase at a time. Invent a whole sentence that uses that word.
Now, while you do this, you might end up getting stuck with the same sentences over and over. For example, if one of your flashcards is por eso, you might be tempted to say the same basic sentence structure every time you quiz with this word. Let’s say you come up with the sentence: Son mis amigos, por eso están aquí. If that’s the only sentence you ever use with this phrase, you’re not getting a lot of great practice. In real life, if you need to say “that’s why”, it'll probably be in a complicated and creative context.
One way to practice for this is to make a game out of it. So each day, when you sit down to study your flashcards, choose a real life conversation topic. Then, as you quiz each flashcard, try to turn the term on that flashcard into a relevant sentence as if it were part of that conversation. To see how this works, check out this video that teaches our flashcard game.
Spaced repetition is a method for reviewing things less and less often as time goes by. For example, if you've just learned the idiom en verdad, which means “actually”, you don't need to review that flashcard every day for the rest of your life. Instead, you might review it tomorrow, and then two days later, and then four days later, and then a week later, and then two weeks later, and then at increasing intervals until it's permanently in your long term memory.
Research shows that reviewing things at increasing intervals is actually better for long term learning. Reviewing something that you've reviewed every day for the last week isn't nearly as valuable as spacing it out: You wait a bit until you almost forget it, and then you review it again. This gives your mind the message that it's something you're likely to need for the long term.
Not only that, but when you review with spaced repetition, you're actually doing less work to learn more. Reviewing each flashcard less and less often means that you can work on learning thousands and thousands of Spanish words and phrases without overwhelming yourself. Since each flashcard is reviewed only a few times at increasing intervals, you'll never have to review a thousand cards in one day.
Some of you might prefer old-school index cards for flashcards—and that’s totally fine. But there are also some great apps that help you keep everything in one place. Some of them even have spaced repetition features, like Anki. I’m not a huge fan of Anki’s interface, but it’s still a good place to start.
Our own coaching students use a quizzing app that we’ve built ourselves, which includes thousands of flashcards that they can use in spaced repetition. You can get access to that tool by joining our next Spanish in One Month Challenge.
To summarize, these tips were:
If you follow these tips, you'll accelerate your path to fluency. This type of active practice will set you up for more deep and personal conversations with the Spanish speakers in your life.
If you want to accelerate your path to fluency, then you should join our One Month Challenge. This is a 4-week bootcamp that takes all of these flashcard strategies, and many more, and bakes them into your daily study routine.
Every day you’ll learn core Spanish with our lessons, quizzes, and flashcards built around the top 100 words in Spanish, which make up 50% of everyday conversations. Each lesson focuses on essential grammar structures like Ser vs Estar, object pronouns, and the subjunctive. All that tough stuff, finally made simple.
The Challenge includes:
You’ll know exactly what to do each day. So there’s no guesswork. Just real progress. Sign up for the next Challenge here.
