Spanish
Spanish Students: Click here to go to Epic! Books and choose a book to read in Spanish.
11 Rad Spanish Learning Websites
This website allows students to access brief explanations of grammatical points and practice with verb drills and pronunciation. It also offers custom flashcards (cool!), an idiom generator and a bilingual cultural section where students can read and listen about different aspects of Hispanic American and Spanish culture.
Okay, so it’s not exactly a site for practicing conjugating irregular verbs or mastering the differences between ser and estar, but the grammar glossary is extremely useful for students who are still struggling to understand how a noun differs from a pronoun and what on earth “subject-verb agreement” means. It’s a “must have” for beginning and intermediate Spanish students, as well as for advanced students who are in need of a refresher!
A cool site that does just what you think it does: It conjugates verbs. In all tenses, moods, shapes and sizes. Students just click here and enter a verb they wish to conjugate, choose the subject pronoun they want and…¡ahí está! (there it is!) The site even offers the -se conjugations of the imperfect subjunctive! Fancy!
A neat-o website from the University of Texas at Austin. The website features a series of video-recorded interviews with native speakers that gradually increase in complexity, so there’s something for every skill level—from beginning to superior. Students can click around here to test themselves or build their listening comprehension skills.
This one comes from the brain of Bowdoin Spanish instructor Enrique Yepes. It’s another neat site similar to Conjugation.org, but that offers a greater number of variables students can choose from.
In addition to verbs, students can click on self-correcting tutorials involving nouns and articles, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation. Some of the links take you to “off-site” websites like StudySpanish.com, while other linked sites have also been designed by Yepes. The breadth and variety of tutorials will appeal to students looking for more integrated options for studying.
This is purely a “test yourself” website, but it’s a very impressive and comprehensive one. No grammatical explanations are offered here, but this “no frills” website offers excellent practice with a very extensive list of grammatical points from the use of prepositions and relative pronouns to preterite and command forms.
Not just one, but several sets of exercises are offered for the most difficult points such as ser and estar and the preterite versus the imperfect. This is a site that your students will definitely want to bookmark!
A cool Spanish language practice website that offers drills similar to those on Matthew D. Stroud’s page. Despite the fact that fewer grammatical points are offered for practice, a neat feature of this site is that students receive extensive feedback as to why a particular answer was right or wrong.
8. FluentU
When your students have gotten their fill of the more traditional grammar and vocabulary practice methods, send them clicking over to FluentU. This is a great website for in-class activities, computer lab class days, long-term group projects and individual homework assignments. Oh, and it’s so much fun that students may not even realize how much study time they’re actually logging in.
That’s because FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons. We’ve got a tremendous collection of authentic Spanish videos that people in the Spanish-speaking world actually watch on the regular.
There are tons of great choices here when you’re looking for material for in-class activities or homework. Plus, all the videos are sorted by skill level and are carefully annotated for students.
Each video has interactive subtitles. If a student comes across a word they’re unfamiliar with, they can hover their cursor over the subtitled word. That word’s definition, pronunciation and in-context usage examples will all pop up on-screen instantly. This is what your students will get after they click “watch” on a video. Clicking “learn” opens up a whole new learning experience for them.
Using FluentU, students will be more engaged and will learn better. Not only does FluentU offer video, but it offers scaffolding that isn’t available anywhere else— students are guaranteed to find this authentic content approachable and within reach.
Perhaps the most interesting part of FluentU is its learn mode. Learn mode takes videos and turns them into full-on Spanish practice time.
Every video-based lesson is fully personalized, so that the student’s learning history is taken into account when presenting questions. FluentU’s algorithm sets students up for success by teaching them based on what they know.
You can get them started by signing yourself up for a FluentU Pro account (designed just for teachers!) and creating lesson plans with videos. Just take a look at this quick start guide!
Quizlet might seem at first glance as though it would be too general to consider on a list like this. However, the website offers the awesome capability to not only make your own study cards, but also to quickly look up and make use of flashcards that other students have designed for their classes.
This means that there are entire sets of flashcards already available for categories like “reflexive verbs,” “body parts,” “animals,” “adjectives” and so much more. Students can even find flashcard sets that correspond with a particular book chapter or teacher/professor.
This site offers numerous complete conjugation charts, links to literary websites related to the Spanish-speaking world and some very extensive explanations of grammar along with many thoughtfully written exercises. Unfortunately, the site is no longer being updated (the professor retired in 2003). However, the site is still being made available for student use.
I must say, one of the best and my personal favorite is Colby College’s website. There’s stuff here for absolute beginners to the most advanced students, ranging from verb conjugation practice to more open-ended exercises and even fun multimedia activities with music. This is a site you’ll definitely want to permanently embed in your Course Management System for all your Spanish language courses and encourage your students to work with often.
