About us

The desire to communicate and connect with people in an entirely different way – that is what drives us to learn another language.

Focus only on learning via apps, textbooks and even classes, and you’ll get a decent grounding in the basics and the grammar. But you won’t learn many of the very phrases and expressions that you will most need in your daily life.

Why learn the Spanish word for every kitchen utensil when you can’t have a decent conversation?

What use is it to know, for example, the Spanish word for every obscure kitchen utensil, or to translate an endless number of bizarre sentences on an app, if you can’t manage to have interesting, amusing or entertaining conversations?

To learn this extra stuff — the social Spanish, street Spanish, the Spanish of every day life — you’ll need to look elsewhere.

What’s this site all about then?

All of us here at SecretsOfSpanish have lived through the entire language learning process: arriving to a foreign land with zero knowledge and working our way, slowly and painfully, over thousands of hours of practice, up to fluency. Getting there, has meant learning, and then unlearning, much of what our teachers and textbooks taught us.

We’ll serve as your guide to the cool Spanish that you really want to be speaking

Creating this site is our way of saving you the same trouble. On SecretsOfSpanish we focus on providing short, and readable, classes about every aspect of the Spanish that your app (or textbook) skipped over.

We’ll teach you a ton of neat phrases and hidden language tricks; tell you how to avoid the expressions that immediately give you away as a learner; show you the Spanish versions of your favourite English phrases; and generally serve as your guide to the cool Spanish that you want to be speaking (instead of the weird sort that the textbook says you should).

Complete beginners need not apply

As you’ll see when you start reading, we’re not aiming to be a site for anyone learning completely from scratch – other sites, apps and resources cover this ground much better than we ever could.

On the flip side, though, we promise that you’ll never find here any painfully detailed grammar explanations, useless vocabulary lists and translation exercises, or just about any other Spanish language content which you doubt you’ll ever be able to use.

Get ready to ditch boring old beginner’s Spanish and start speaking like a local

In fact, if you finish any of our articles without thinking to yourself: “Ahh! So that’s how you say that in Spanish!”, then we’re not doing our job right.

And we’re relying on you tell us if we’re not – if there’s any expression you just can’t figure how to say in Spanish, and we’ll get you the answer.

Great, well, looks like it’s time already to ditch that boring old beginner’s Spanish and start speaking like a real life local. So, please, read on…