The ten conversations you can practise
- 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 form you will hear from staff and strangers in Spain and in most of Latin America. Making plans and small talk use tú, because those are friends. Doctor and Pharmacy are the two nobody wants to rehearse, and the two you cannot get through by miming. Where a reply changes with your gender, both forms are accepted, so encantado or encantada, alérgico or alérgica.
Check a phrase without judging your fluency
Look at the marked differences between your reply and the closest accepted phrase. You might need an article, a spelling correction or por favor. You don’t need accents or punctuation to pass, but read the accented form to learn it. If your Spanish is correct but absent from the list, choose Accept mine and continue to keep your wording in the transcript. Treat this as recall practice, not a fluency score.
Order your first coffee
You hear “Buenos días. ¿Qué le pongo?”. Order a coffee with milk: un café con leche, not el café con leche. Next, answer “¿Grande o pequeño?”. If you miss two turns, practise those again after the sixth. On your next visit, start with the turns you missed to check whether you remember them.
Which conversation to start with
You will meet ¿Puedo pagar con tarjeta? in four of the ten conversations: café, pharmacy, taxi and restaurant. 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 is every prompt, with what it asks of you and a model reply, so you can read through them before a trip.