30 days to learn Spanish

My partner and I are visiting Mexico in 34 days.

I challenge myself to, in 30 days, work through all of Complete Spanish Step-By-Step. It's a 600 page Spanish textbook conveniently crunched into 30 chapters. So, 1 chapter per day!

It’s worth noting that I have some prior experience in Spanish; I took 3 years in high school, and have very sporadically learned 500 words out of 1000 in a Spanish Anki deck (flash card set).

The second part to this challenge is completing Refold.la's ES1K deck containing the 1000 most important words in the Spanish language. In order to complete before our flight on Feb. 5th, I’ll need to learn 15 new cards per day to complete the deck before our flight on Feb. 5th. Sounds easy enough… but with Anki it isn’t a simple matter of learning 15 words and calling it a day. It means, the next day, I will review those 15 words, and add 15 new ones. And the following day, in simpler terms, I’ll review the first 15, the second 15, and add a third 15. Eventually when Anki deems I’m more comfy with a word, the word’s reviews progressively become weekly and monthly instead of daily, but this takes time! so, trying to squeeze the rest of the deck in will be difficult.

this'll be quite a challenge, let's see how it goes!

Day 1 (1/2/26)

I spent 73mins on Anki. I fear this number might increase as 15 new words per day can compound to many many more reviews. But to be fair I hadn’t caught up on my reviews since November, so it makes sense why I spent so much time on reviews.

Fortunately, Chapter 1 “Nouns, Articles, and Adjectives” was a breeze. I took Spanish in high school for 3 years & so this is real introductory stuff for me; el vs la, vs una, using adjectives, etc.

On to Day 2!

(most people are at this point inclined to skip to the Day 30 section… if you continue to read linearly and entirely, props to you :D)