The ten conversations you can practice
There are 58 turns in all, from ordering at a café to seeing a doctor.
- Café is 6 turns in usted: ordering at the counter of a busy café.
- Directions is 6 turns in usted: stopping a passer-by to find the train station.
- Pharmacy is 5 turns in usted: asking a pharmacist for something for a headache.
- Market is 6 turns in usted: buying fruit and vegetables from a market stall.
- Hotel check-in is 6 turns in usted: arriving at reception with a booking for two nights.
- Taxi is 5 turns in usted: a late taxi to the airport.
- Making plans is 6 turns in tú: a friend texts about the weekend.
- Restaurant is 6 turns in usted: dinner for two without a booking.
- Doctor is 6 turns in usted: a walk-in appointment with a sore throat and a fever.
- Small talk is 6 turns in tú: meeting someone new at a friend's party.
Eight of the ten use usted, the polite form. You’ll hear it from staff and strangers across Spain and Latin America. Making plans and small talk use tú, because you’re talking to friends.
Doctor and Pharmacy are the two nobody wants to rehearse, and the two you can’t get through by pointing.
Where a reply changes with your gender, both forms count: encantado or encantada, alérgico or alérgica.
Check a phrase without judging your fluency
After each reply, you see where it differs from the closest correct phrase. Often it’s a missing article or a missing por favor.
Accents and punctuation aren’t required to pass, but read the accented form to learn it. Each turn accepts several right answers, 591 across all ten conversations.
If your Spanish is right but not on the list, choose Accept mine and continue. Your wording stays in the transcript. This checks what you remember, not how fluent you are.
Order your first coffee
You hear “Buenos días. ¿Qué le pongo?” (good morning, what can I get you). Order a coffee with milk: un café con leche, not el café con leche. Then say which size: grande or pequeño.
Miss two turns and you’ll practice them again after the sixth. Next time, start with the turns you missed to see whether they stuck.
Which conversation to start with
Asking to pay by card, ¿Puedo pagar con tarjeta?, comes up in four of the ten, from the café to the taxi. If you learn one line by heart before you land, make it that one.
After that:
- Say the reply out loud before typing it.
- Use Listen on each prompt where your browser has a Spanish voice, and reply before reading the translation.
- Open Show phrases after a miss, not before. Recalling first is what makes the phrase stick.
- Run a scenario twice in a week. The retry round covers what you missed today. The second run checks whether it stayed.
Phrasebook
Here’s every prompt with a model reply, so you can read through them before a trip.
