There’s a good reason why Free Spanish Tutor is a top choice in the Education category at iTunes: It’s a well-designed language tool to get you or your child up and running on basic Spanish words and phrases.
Free Spanish Tutor won’t get you to the point of being able to converse with a native speaker, but it is effective for memorizing elementary concepts, especially for passing language quizzes. Upon launching, you’re presented with five categories of phrases: Town & Country, Food & Dining, Opposites, Basic Phrases and Questions. Once you select a category, you can then peruse a study list of words and hear it pronounced. Each category contains approximately 20 to 25 words.
There are four types of quizzes to test your knowledge. There’s a standard multiple choice quiz, as well as a progressively more challenging puzzle and write-in quiz. These latter two present you with the English word, which you then have to type in the Spanish translation.
The last quiz is a flash card module which you can set to automatically cycle through the word list. All the quizzes have a button to hear the word in Spanish, which I thought was a nice touch so you can test both your written and aural comprehension. The app also keeps track of your quiz performance results, which can be a way to motivate students.
Finally, the app allows you to customize the quizzes through prioritizing the most challenging words.
The one drawback is that this free app contains about 100 words. But if you’re serious about learning or practicing Spanish, the developer offers a series of more advanced lessons (Spanish 101, Spanish 102) for $7.99 each.
