One you’ve got a grasp of Spanish, it’s important to start looking up words in a monolingual Spanish dictionary. Instead of an English translation of the word you’re after, get the definition in Spanish and you have to stretch yourself, suffer, and struggle a bit. But in the end you will learn more if you keep at it.

Sure, you can go out and buy a great printed dictionary, but let’s take a look at the best online monolingual Spanish dictionaries.

The RAE Building in Madrid, Spain.

1. The RAE’s Diccionario de la lengua española.

The RAE publishes one of the most prestigious Spanish dictionaries in print, which is also available on their website. It’s all in Spanish, with Spanish definitions. One of the best free resources you can find online.

2. Diccionarios.com

I remember when this site was free. Now, if you want to do more than a couple of searches, you’re going to have to sign up and pay for the privilege. But it is probably worthwhile. This dictionary gives you a definition, audio pronunciation, synonyms and antonyms in Spanish, as well as having bilingual diccionarios in Spanish for: English, French, Catalan, German, Italian, and Portuguese. If you want your free trial to last a minute longer so you can really convince yourself to sign up, just clear the cookies in your browser.

3. Signum’s Spanish Thesaurus.

This is a decent dictionary if what you’re looking for is a synonym, antonym, part of speech, or inflection. The only thing missing are some definitions. But hey, it’s free and you can get an idea of what a word means by looking at its synonyms.

4. The Dictionary at ElMundo.es.

This site does not seem as “formal” as the other three– that’s the only way I can describe it– but it has a fairly exhaustive dictionary with definitions, as well as a thesaurus and several bilingual dictionaries. The good thing is it’s free.

Now you have no excuse not to use a monolingual “Spanish-Spanish” dictionary!

If you’re in the market for learning Spanish, you probably have heard of Dr. Paul Pimsleur’s books and audio courses for language acquisition.

About Dr. Pimsleur

Paul Pimsleur was a French teacher, linguist and memory expert whose research focused on language acquisition and how children learn language without having formal knowledge of their language’s grammar and structure. His four basic tenets are: Anticipation, Graduated Interval Recall, Core Vocabulary, and Organic Learning. The result of this research was his language learning system that trains adults in a new language using an all-audio approach. Learners listen and speak along with a CD and learn their target language in a naturalistic fashion.

This is all good and well, but the typical Pimsleur course costs about $250. Is it worth it?

Free Spanish Lesson

See for yourself by taking the Spanish course for a test drive. Simon & Schuster, the publishers of Pimsleur’s works, offers the first 30-minute lesson of the Pimleur course for most languages. Download or listen to the mp3 of the first Spanish lesson, and see what you think.

Buy the Full Course

If you’re convinced, you can get it on amazon That’s the level one course, there are also level two and level three. Each one has thirty 30-minute lessons. If you don’t want to pop for one of these full-fledged courses, you can get just the first 8 lessons for about $20.

Here are links to these courses on Amazon, which is a lot cheaper than some other bookstores. Disclosure: If you use these links to buy a course, I will get a fee from Amazon for referring you to them.

• Spanish Quick & Simple (Lessons 1-8) about $15
• Spanish One (Lessons 1-30) about $220
• Spanish Two (Lessons 31-60) about $220
• Spanish Three (Lessons 61-90) about $220

You can find all kinds of things on the BBC website, and one of those that I ran across today is a Basic Spanish course. It’s designed for kids, but it looks useful to anyone who is beginning to learn Spanish. There’s lots of basic vocabulary and phrases with interactive characters that pronounce the words for you. After you’ve gone through the basics, browse the learn more section where there’s a handful of other units. It’s all fairly basic, but very well done, with visual and audio interaction, and the four cartoon characters that lead you around.

Here are a few more false cognates for ya’ll.

Marido. The word marido sounds a lot like ‘married’, but it really means ‘husband’. Esposo is another way to say husband. For wife, try esposa or mujer.

Chocar. This verb has nothing to do with choking, which would be estrangular, ahogar or sofocar. Chocar means to crash. It can also be used to express disgust or dislike. “Me choca esa canción” means “I’m sick of that song”.

Sensible does not mean sensible. Sensible in English is sensato, and sensible in Spanish is sensitive in English.

Vaso. This Spanish would means glass/cup when referring to a drinking vessel. Vaso is also used for vein. Vaso sanguíneo is blood vein. The English vase is a florero.

Pariente. This is does not mean parent, it means relative as in blood relations. Parents are padres.

Sano means healthy. To talk about being sane, look up the words juicio, cuerdo, cordura and sensato.

And that’s all I can think of for now. I’ll have to sit down and see if I can come up with some more to round out this series. It seems like it should have at least 5 parts.

Here’s a transcription of a worksheet from a Mexican grade school. Let’s see if you know some of these mistakes that native speakers make.

¿Cómo se dice?
Mejoremos un poco

La comunicación oral es una herramienta que usamos la mayor parte del tiempo, nos ayuda a expresar sentimientos, deseos, necesidades, elogios, también nos sirve para causar algo negativo en otro, pero sin duda el hablar nos ayuda a quedar bien o mal frente a los demás. Aquí van algunas correcciones que te ayudarán a corregir lo que pronuncias mal.

Correcto — Incorrecto
dijiste — dijistes
viste — vistes
a veces — en veces
hoy — a hoy
nadie — nadien
sin embargo — pero sin embargo
cerca de — cercas de
debes ir, debes hacer — debes de ir, hacer
Ana e Iván — Ana y Iván
leones u osos de peluche — leones o osos de peluche
dar una disculpa — pedir una disculpa
haya dicho — haiga dicho
irresponsable — inrresponsable
espérame tantito — perame tantito
mira ven — ira ven
catsup — capsu
préstamelo — empréstamelo
diferencia — diferiencia

So if you want to sound like a native speaker, make some of these mistakes Actually only kids make these mistakes– por lo general adults don’t.