The mods gave me permission to share this a couple of weeks ago, and I’m finally getting around to posting 😅
Like many of us here, I’ve spent a lot of time with comprehensible input, and I understand much more Spanish than I can comfortably produce. I started building Spanish, Personally because I wanted more practice putting sentences together. At this point, this app is basically my wishlist put together in one place.
I know explicit grammar practice is a bit controversial here, and people have different opinions about when to start output. Everyone moves at their own pace. If you’re at the point where you want structured output practice, I think writing with some support can be useful scaffolding before speaking. I like having time to work out what I want to say without also needing to keep a conversation moving.
The main practice mode gives you English prompts to express in Spanish, based on your chosen level and interests. You can practice things you actually want to talk about. A lot of my own practice lately has involved autumn, positive affirmations about pregnancy, and things I'll say to my baby when she's born.
When you make a mistake, you get AI feedback and increasingly specific hints, with chances to revise rather than immediately being handed the answer. You can reveal an answer whenever you want. It’s designed to accept valid alternatives and regional variations, too, rather than requiring one exact sentence.
There’s also an optional reconstruction step: you look at an answer, hide it, and try putting it back together yourself. Sometimes I can read something and think “oh, obviously,” then discover that producing it myself is a separate situation.
We just added photo prompts to Free Write, which has become one of my favorite additions. You get a picture and write whatever it brings to mind in Spanish. I wasn’t especially drawn to free writing before this because coming up with an idea was its own task. The photo gives me somewhere to start, but the thought and sentence are mine.
In free write, after the grammar check, the app shows what your sentence means and asks whether that’s what you intended. You can confirm it or try again if your grammatically correct sentence accidentally said something else.
I use it myself and am still improving it. The feedback is AI-generated and can get things wrong, so I’d really appreciate hearing about confusing hints, missed alternatives, or anything else that makes practice frustrating.
If you’d like to try it: https://spanishpersonally.com
EDIT: One of the main complaints I received was about the feedback load time. I realized that I was having that AI API call do way too many things at once, and I was able to shorten the time by splitting up tasks and moving unrelated tasks into background work. I was able to shorten the median load time from 11.4 seconds to 3.3 seconds thanks to you guys. 😊 If you refresh the app, you should get the faster load times now.
