Native courses
Which Spanish?
Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile — one language, five personalities. Learn what actually changes between them and stop being surprised by the Spanish you meet.
intermediate → advanced · 5 steps · 5 scenes
After this course you can
- Recognise the fillers and flow that mark a speaker as Spanish from Spain — and use them yourself
- Handle Mexican Spanish's elastic time, courtesy machines and the one verb you must never use for the bus
- Decode Colombia's affectionate usted, order like a local and know why nobody gives papaya
- Conjugate for vos, survive the sh-sound and read the room on che and boludo in Argentina
- Walk into the deep end — Chilean voseo, vanishing consonants and the fifty words that only exist there
“Which Spanish should I learn?” is the question every learner asks and every textbook dodges. The honest answer: they’re one language — but the greeting, the word for cool, the word for hangover and even the word for you change the moment you cross a border. This course is the map.
You start in Spain, with the rhythm and fillers that make Peninsular speech instantly recognisable — the baseline the rest of the course pushes against. Then four survival guides, in rising order of difficulty: Mexico, where the grammar stays put but courtesy and slang do all the talking; Colombia, where usted means love as often as distance; Argentina, which swaps the whole conjugation table under vos; and finally Chile, gleefully spoken of as the place fluent speakers go to feel like beginners again.
Each step pairs a lesson with a short practice session built from its real sentences. Read the lesson, do the practice — and when a step has a scene, play it too — and the next step unlocks. By the end you won’t just have picked your Spanish — you’ll understand the other four when they talk back.
What's inside
Counted from the course itself. Nothing here is rounded up.
- 5 steps
- A lesson, a drill built from it, and a scene — in the order real life hands them to you.
- 5 scenes
- Branching conversations with no undo. Where you end up is wherever your replies took you, and you can always play it again.
- 40 drills
- Built from the sentences in the step they belong to: multiple choice, gap-fills, word order, matching.
- 145 native-speaker notes
- On the replies: what gives you away, and what somebody local would have said instead.
- 5 audio sessions
- Hands-free, and not a read-through: you get the prompt, then a silence to answer out loud in, then the answer. For the walk or the washing-up.
- A journal, and its review
- Phrases you earn in a scene are kept. Later the course hands them back and asks you to write them out from memory.
A map of the whole thing- Every place the course takes you, on one board, opening as you get to it.
This is what a scene feels like
The opening of La caña, the first scene of Which Spanish?. You walk into it once step 1 is done.
Una terraza de Malasaña, MadridWith: Marta, El camarero
You hear
Marta
¡Anda, ya estás aquí! Soy Marta, la amiga de Lucía. ¿Qué tal? ¿Has encontrado bien el bar?
Oh hey, you're here! I'm Marta, Lucía's friend. How's it going? Did you find the bar okay?
Your reply — pick one
- 1Pues al final sí. Es que me he perdido un poco por Malasaña, pero ya está.Well, in the end, yes. The thing is I got a bit lost around Malasaña, but it's fine now.
- 2Sí, gracias. He encontrado el bar sin problemas.Yes, thanks. I found the bar with no problems.
- 3Buenas tardes. Estoy muy bien, ¿y usted?Good afternoon. I am very well, and you?
What you find out after you choose
Understood, but clumsy
You said: Buenas tardes. Estoy muy bien, ¿y usted?
'Usted' to someone your own age, at a terraza, over beers, is a register miss in Spain — it does not read as polite, it reads as distant, and she will correct it on the spot. Hold the thought, though: in Bogotá this exact instinct would serve you well, where 'usted' can carry warmth. Which is the whole point of this course — the same word lands differently in every country.
145 notes like that one sit behind the replies in this course — not whether you were right, but what you sounded like.
Who these are for
You have the basics of Spanish and they run out fast in real rooms. This course starts where that happens.
Who they are not for
- Anyone who needs a certificate. Nothing here maps to CEFR, nothing is examined, and no one is watching.
- Anyone who wants grammar tables. The grammar is inside the sentences, explained where it actually bites.
The pathway
Every step, in order. Your own progress lives on the page you play from.
Step 1 of 5 · intermediate
Sounding Natural — Rhythm, Fillers and FlowStop sounding like a textbook. Learn the fillers, connectors and word-linking habits that give native Spanish its unmistakable flow.
Step 2 of 5 · advanced
Mexican Spanish — A Survival GuideGüey, ahorita, mande and the art of the diminutive — everything you need to stop sounding like a textbook and start sounding chilango.
Step 3 of 5 · advanced
Colombian Spanish — A Survival GuideParce, tinto, qué pena and the polite usted best friends use on each other — how to sound Colombian from Bogotá to Medellín, beyond the myth of the 'clearest Spanish in the world'.
Step 4 of 5 · advanced
Argentine Spanish — A Survival GuideVoseo, the famous sh-sound, che and essential lunfardo slang — everything that makes Argentine Spanish gloriously different.
Step 5 of 5 · advanced
Chilean Spanish: A Survival GuideChile is where fluent Spanish speakers go to feel like beginners again. The voseo nobody warned you about, the vanishing consonants, and the fifty words that only exist here.
Before you start
Do I need an account?
No. There is nothing to sign up for. Your progress is kept in this browser, which means it is waiting when you come back — on this device, in this browser, and not on your phone as well.
What does it cost?
Nothing. Every course, every scene and every drill is free while we grow.
Where do I start?
At step one of whichever course matches where you are now. Everything after it stays shut until you have done the one before, so there is no order to get wrong.
Do I have to play the scenes?
Where a step has one, yes — playing it is part of what opens the next step. It is also the only place you have to produce the language with somebody waiting, which is the whole point of it.
Can I get it wrong?
In a scene, constantly: every reply gets an answer and the conversation carries on, because what opens the next step is having turned up, not how well it went. Drills are stricter — three lives, and running out means taking that step again. Either way nothing is lost but the run.
Start where you actually are.
Free while we grow. Your progress stays in this browser.