About

A Spanish tutor got stuck, and built this.

The short version: most of what you teach on Monday is gone by Thursday, and there was nothing that fixed it without adding work for the teacher. So this does the six days in between, and asks nothing of anybody.

Why I made it

I've taught Spanish for years — absolute beginners through to A-level. Along the way I built up a mountain of my own resources: worksheets, question banks, role-play cards, the lot. Tried and tested on real students who told me, fairly bluntly, which bits were rubbish.

Earlier this year I hit a wall. My GCSE students needed practice between lessons and I had nothing honest to give them. Thirty students. One of me. Everyone needing something slightly different, and no way to know what any of them had actually done.

What stayed with me was knowing what each student had actually done between our lessons — instead of opening with “so, did you get a chance to look at that?” and watching them shrug.

I've spent this summer going back through fifteen years of notes, throwing out what didn't work, and turning the rest into something other tutors can use. That's Chuleta.

— Guillermo

The mechanism

A word does not arrive learned.

It moves, and what we ask for moves with it — recognition first, then recall, then production. Meeting a word three ways beats meeting it three times the same way, because recognising it, retrieving it and saying it are different skills, and the exam asks for the last one.

Words cool down

músicaowned
met three times, three weeks apart
el reciclajecooling
owned in October, not seen since

Owned is a high-water mark and never drops. But a word untouched for weeks is not owned in the way it was, so it comes back — spaced further apart each time it survives. That spacing is the whole mechanism.

Something to hang it on

Some words will not stick on repetition alone. Those get a hook — a reason the word is the shape it is.

dado que — literally “given that”. Same shape as the English.

Not a mnemonic invented to be clever. Usually the etymology, which is the version that survives an exam.

Straight answers

What it is, and isn't.

Real Spanish audio, read by a Spanish teacher, not a synthesiser
2,179 words and phrases — the AQA and Edexcel lists, with per-board tiers
Works without sound, if that suits you better
Students need no email, no password, no account
Works on a phone, with no signal
Every sentence pattern checked by a human
It's the homework, not the lesson. Someone still has to teach them.
Nothing listens to their pronunciation. When they say a word aloud they mark themselves against the recording, and we'd rather say that than invent a score.
No dictation and no read-aloud marking. Both are on the 2024 spec and neither is built — they'll appear here when they work, not before.
Not a chatbot pretending to be a teacher.
It's early, and I'd rather you saw it early.
Monday morning

For the person teaching them

If you set the words, you also get to see what happened to them.

Who practised

And who didn't, before you're sitting in front of them.

What they're still missing

The words that keep coming back — and the ones they got right slowly, which is a different problem.

How far through a topic

“Ana has met 23 of the 41 words the board can test on Free time.”

Something to show parents

The same sentence, in an email.

For teachers →