Learn Spanish by LetterEspañol

A language of two hemispheres, four centuries, and countless voices

Spanish is the second most spoken native language in the world, with around 500 million native speakers across more than twenty countries, and nearly 600 million speakers in total. It is an official language of the United Nations and, after Mandarin, the mother tongue of more people than any other. From Madrid to Buenos Aires, from Lima to Los Angeles, it is a language of extraordinary reach and remarkable unity.

Modern Spanish grew from the Castilian of medieval León and Castile, carried across an ocean in the sixteenth century and enriched everywhere it landed. It is the language of Cervantes, whose Don Quixote is often called the first modern novel, of the Siglo de Oro, of Sor Juana, Borges, Neruda, and García Márquez, whose sentences gave the twentieth century one of its great literary voices.

Spanish rewards the writer with a living subjunctive, a music of accents, and a precision of feeling that the spoken language can blur. The difference between ser and estar, between tú and usted, between the indicative and the subjunctive, is the difference between one shade of meaning and another. On the page, with time to choose, you learn to feel these distinctions rather than merely follow them.

The Spanish-speaking world has a deep epistolary tradition, from the letters of Santa Teresa de Ávila, written in a prose so clear it remains a model four centuries later, to the correspondence of poets and exiles across the Atlantic. To write a Spanish letter is to join a conversation that has crossed oceans and centuries.