Your first 100 Spanish words

How was this list of Spanish words chosen?

Most first-word lists are someone's guess. This one is counted. We took the free chapters (1 and 2) of all 24 A1 and A2 series in the Contos Spanish library, 48 chapters and 10,495 words of story text, and counted every word form. We removed character names and any word that appeared in fewer than 5 of the 48 chapters, so one story's pet or prop can't sneak in. The 100 most frequent forms that were left are below.

Together they make up about 54% of every word in those chapters, and about 57% of the A1 chapters alone. Learn them and more than half of a beginner story is already familiar.

For a general-purpose ranking, Mark Davies and Kathy Hayward Davies's A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish (2nd edition, Routledge, 2018) is built from a corpus of more than 2 billion words from 21 Spanish-speaking countries. For why a list like this matters at all, see how many Spanish words you need.

Which little words hold Spanish sentences together?

These 41 words are short and easy to overlook, but they account for the biggest share of every page. You rarely need to study them: you need to recognise them instantly.

Articles: the and a (8)

Prepositions and linking words (14)

Pronouns and possessives (15)

Questions and numbers (4)

Accents matter in this group. Qué (what) and que (that), él (he) and el (the), sí (yes) and si (if) sound the same; the written accent tells you which word you are reading.

Which Spanish verb forms come first?

Beginner stories are told in the present tense, mostly about one person, so the commonest verb forms are third person singular: he or she "says", "looks", "opens". That is why the list shows dice, not decir. Learn the form you see; the dictionary form is there so you can look up the rest of the verb later.

Es and está both mean "is". Es (from ser) describes what something is; está (from estar) describes how or where it is. Chapter 1 of The Building on Calle Sol uses both in its first lines, and hay (there is, there are) never changes for singular or plural.

Which everyday nouns and adverbs should you know?

When, how and how much (15)

People, places and things (22)

Piso is a Spain word: a flat, or a floor of a building. Latin American Spanish more often says apartamento or departamento; the Contos stories use both piso and apartamento. Mañana means both "morning" and "tomorrow", and tarde both "afternoon or evening" and "late".

The quickest way to fix these words is to meet them in a story rather than a table. For a themed set, try our Spanish food vocabulary.