Spanish phrases for tourists: the twenty you will spend first in Spain

You are not trying to become fluent. You have a flight to Madrid, Málaga or Bilbao in a few weeks, and you want to order, pay, ask and apologise without turning to your phone every time. Polite, not fluent. Capable enough that nobody has to work around you.

Here is the moment that decides it. You are standing at a bar counter with two people behind you and about four seconds of attention from the person serving. If you hesitate, they will switch to English out of kindness, and the conversation is over before it started. Nothing you learned goes to waste, it just never gets spent. The job is not knowing the words, it is having the first five words already in your mouth before you reach the counter.

That is why a list of two hundred phrases is the wrong shape for a two week trip, and why a course that works through present tense conjugation for three weeks is the wrong shape too. A short trip is a small set of repeated transactions. You will say some version of "the bill, please" more times than you will say anything else in the language. Those repeats, said out loud until they are automatic, are what the twenty lines below are built from.

This page is the spending list. If you want the wider decision about what to study and in what order before departure, the companion guide on Spanish for travel covers that ground and this page does not repeat it.

You can know all twenty lines and still get a blank look, because Spanish is less forgiving of vowel drift than it is of grammar. Four things are worth drilling out loud before the flight.

• The soft th. In most of Spain, the c in gracias and the z in plaza are said like the th in think. Grathias, platha. Say it the Latin American way and you will still be understood, but this is the single sound that makes you sound like you prepared for Spain rather than for Spanish in general.
• The j and the soft g. Rioja, jamón, elegir. A dry scrape at the back of the throat, closer to the ch in loch than to an English h. Under-doing it is the common mistake.
• One tap or a roll. The r in pero is a single flick of the tongue. The rr in perro is a roll. If the roll will not come, the single tap is the better fallback, because a soft English r is what turns a word into noise.
• Five pure vowels, held short. A, e, i, o and u never slide into each other. English speakers stretch the o in por into something like poor, and that one vowel is enough to stall a sentence. Keep them clipped.

Two courtesies worth the same practice time. Use usted with anyone working behind a counter until you are invited to do otherwise, and put por favor at the end of the sentence rather than the front, where it lands more naturally. At a bar, ¿me pone? is the local shape of an order and sits more comfortably than the textbook quiero.

Phrazl is not open to buy yet. What is written above is what the product is built to do: a Spain trip set up in three steps, a phrase set ordered by what the trip spends first, three ways to practise it out loud, and a schedule that tightens as your departure date gets closer.

If you have a Spanish flight booked, the waitlist is the place to put your departure date on record. Sign-in is email and password, and reset emails go out through Resend when you ask for one. The app stores your email, name and a hashed password, your trips with their destination, departure date and chosen scenarios, your review history per phrase, your purchase records from Stripe, and any support request you send from the account screen. All of it sits on Amazon Web Services in a managed Postgres database, kept while your account exists, with server logs rolling off within 30 days.

You can delete a single trip and its review history from that trip's edit screen, or press delete account to remove the account, trips, review history, purchase records and support requests at once. Stripe keeps its own payment records as the law requires. A few things are honestly not in place: there is no support email address, so purchase and refund problems are raised from the support form on the account screen, and there is no SOC 2 report, no two-factor authentication and no export of your review history. Better you read that here than discover it in August.

Other destinations in this pillar get the same treatment, so if Spain is one of two trips this year, the Italian restaurant page, the Greek page, the German page, the Paris page, the Japanese page, the Portuguese page and the Mandarin page are worth a look before you decide between a single trip pack and the bundle.