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In my search for an app to help me practice numbers, I downloaded Spanish Smash. It’s a falling blocks sort of game with an audio component, many many levels, and multiple vocab sections.

lessons animals numbers

Is it fun? If you like falling block games, then you’ll probably like it. The graphics are pretty cute (though all the brown animals blend into the background a bit) as well. The game is visually appealing and the difficulty increases reasonably. You collect hearts (for lives) and stars (for success) which adds to the game aspect.

The whole bullfighter aesthetic rubbed me the wrong way. My Spanish teacher (who is Españiola) said she didn’t find it racist but could absolutely see how other Spaniards might object, especially as Spain has been trying to distance itself from bullfighting. It definitely is an unfortunate graphic choice I’ve seen too many times with Spanish learning material.

I found the background music to be so incredibly obnoxious and distracting that it completely ruined the higher levels for me. When I could silence my phone completely, I appreciated the speed-based matching.

Is it educational? Well, speed recall isn’t a bad thing at all, especially for basic vocabulary like this. I appreciated that there’s no English needed to do the games. This means that you can go directly from “1” to “uno,” no side-trip into English needed. The graphics and audio are clear enough to reinforce learning. A blurb on the site compared Spanish Smash favorably to Rosetta Stone, and I just don’t see that. The app just seems to be vocab review–flashy flashcards–not anything more substantial. It’s possible that higher levels get more varied; I couldn’t put up with the music long enough to find out.

If you can put up with the music, this is a nice alternative to flashcards.

Name: Spanish Smash
Platform: iOS, Android and Kindle Fire
Price: freemium (iOS version has two free vocab packs and each one after that is $0.99)
Languages: Spanish (no English knowledge needed)
Language Level: Beginning (I-II from that link); other vocab packs might be harder