Recommendations
A small selection of platforms and products I have used personally and recommend for serious learners of Latin American Spanish. Every recommendation here is something I would suggest to a friend.
There is no shortage of products marketed to people learning Spanish. Most of them I would not recommend — not because they are bad, exactly, but because they do not particularly serve the kind of reader this site is for. Many are designed for tourists looking for survival phrases. Others promise fluency in unrealistic timeframes. Still others teach a generic, country-less Spanish that does not exist outside of textbooks.
The three products below are different. They are the small set of platforms and courses I have used myself, sustained over years, and they serve specific needs for serious learners of Latin American Spanish. Each does something the others do not, and together they cover the territory a serious learner has to cross — from comprehension at the foundational stages, to active practice in the intermediate, to conversation with native speakers at the moment the learner is ready to begin speaking.
I have written substantive reviews of each, and the full evaluations live in the Reviews section of this site. What follows is the short version — what each product is, and why it earned its place here.
The Three Recommendations
Spanish Uncovered — for reading and listening through stories
Olly Richards' Spanish Uncovered series teaches the language through extended stories rather than through grammar drills and vocabulary lists. Each course is built around a single full-length narrative, with native-speaker audio in both Latin American and Castilian Spanish, and the language emerges from the story as the learner reads and listens. For the learner who is drawn into a language through literature and narrative, this is the strongest input-rich course I know.
Rocket Spanish — for structured audio practice
Rocket Spanish takes a different approach — shorter audio lessons (twenty to thirty minutes), explicit grammar instruction, pronunciation training through voice recognition, and role-play exercises that simulate two-sided conversations. The course is built around Latin American Spanish throughout, without the Castilian-leaning instructional framework that Spanish Uncovered has. For the learner who wants structure and active practice tools more than narrative immersion, this is the better starting point.
italki — for one-on-one conversation with native speakers
italki is the online marketplace that connects language learners with native-speaker tutors from around the world for one-on-one video lessons. The platform's distinguishing feature, for readers of this site specifically, is that it lets you choose tutors by their country of origin — so a learner pursuing Argentine Spanish can work with Argentines, a learner pursuing Mexican Spanish with Mexicans, a learner pursuing Colombian Spanish with Colombians. After ten years of using the platform, I have worked with tutors from nearly every Spanish-speaking country in Latin America, and I would still recommend it to anyone serious about the language today.
How These Three Fit Together
A short word on how to think about using these three products together, since the order matters.
Reading and listening come first. They are how the language gets into the learner — through comprehensible input, sustained over time, with patience for the discomfort of incomplete understanding. Spanish Uncovered and Rocket Spanish both serve this stage, through different methodologies. Some learners will prefer the story-based approach of the first; others will prefer the structured audio approach of the second. Either, or both, will build the foundation.
Speaking comes later, once enough of the language has settled into the learner's mind that producing it is a matter of using what is already there rather than reaching for what is not. This is when italki becomes the next step — when the learner is ready to put their accumulated comprehension into their own mouth, in conversation with real native speakers.
A learner who tries to speak before they can comprehend is reaching for something they have not yet built. A learner who builds comprehension patiently, and then begins to speak as that comprehension matures, is following the path that languages are actually acquired along.
These three products, used in this order and sustained over time, will take a serious learner further than almost any other combination of resources I know.
— A.C. Maas