Free B2 Spanish course: upper intermediate

At B2 you follow films and the news, read articles and argue a point with native speakers. The grammar is the past subjunctive, hypotheses with si, and the finer uses of ser and estar.

20 grammar lessons, 4 graded stories, 9 classic books, flashcards and an AI conversation partner, all free. Plan on roughly 225 hours of study for this level (600 in total from zero, by an approximate CEFR estimate that isn't specific to Spanish).

What you'll be able to do

• Listening: I can understand most TV news and current-affairs programmes from Spain.
• Listening: I can follow most films and series in standard Spanish, and the main Latin American accents.
• Reading: I can read articles and columns on current issues where the writer takes a position.
• Reading: I can read contemporary literary prose.
• Speaking: I can talk with native speakers fluently and spontaneously enough that neither of us has to strain.
• Speaking: I can explain my point of view and discuss hypotheses (Si tuviera más tiempo…).
• Writing: I can write an argued text giving reasons for and against a point of view.
• Writing: I can write a formal letter of complaint or request using usted and set formal phrases.

What you'll learn

Learning B2 Spanish with AI

At B2 you can debate with the AI partner, ask it to rewrite your text in a more natural style, and ask for a review of your strengths and gaps based on your results. The AI also explains any wrong answer in a lesson, in plain English. It's included free, with a daily allowance; like any AI it can make mistakes, so the lessons remain the reference. More about learning Spanish with AI.

All 20 B2 grammar lessons

Free to read here. In the app, each one is taught in short steps with audio, practised, and brought back for review.

1. The imperfect subjunctive: -ra and -se forms
2. Which subjunctive? Sequence of tenses
3. Hypotheses: si tuviera, iría
4. The perfect subjunctive: haya hecho
5. Past hypotheses: si hubiera sabido, habría venido
6. Future and conditional perfect, including guesses about the past
7. Subjunctive in relative clauses: busco a alguien que sepa
8. para que, antes de que, sin que, a menos que, con tal de que
9. aunque + indicative or subjunctive
10. como si + imperfect subjunctive
11. Reported speech in full: questions, commands, tense shifts
12. Relatives with prepositions: en el que, con quien, cuyo, lo cual
13. Impersonal constructions: se, uno, the third person plural
14. Neuter lo: lo bueno, lo + adjective + que
15. Verbs with fixed prepositions: acordarse de, pensar en, soñar con
16. Arguing: no obstante, por lo tanto, dado que, en cambio
17. Ser and estar: nuance, results and set phrases
18. Infinitive or gerund: al llegar, de haberlo sabido
19. Word formation: nouns from verbs and adjectives (-ción, -miento, -dad)
20. Idioms and set phrases for B2

Reading at B2

• El reloj de la estación: Short literary story: Marta returns to her village station after twenty years to meet someone who may or may not come. The ending is left open.
• Cenar a las diez: Opinion column: are Spain's late meal times the fault of the time zone, or of the working day?
• El pueblo que volvió a abrir su escuela: News feature: remote workers bring children back to a small village school in rural Spain, and not everyone is convinced it will last.
• Carta de reclamación: Formal letter of complaint to an online shop about a sofa that arrived late and damaged, with the conventions of formal written Spanish (usted/ustedes, Por la presente…, Atentamente).
• La Navidad en las montañas by Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1871): A soldier spends Christmas Eve in a Mexican mountain village transformed by its kind Spanish priest.
• Marianela by Benito Pérez Galdós (1878): Nela, a poor orphan girl in a mining village, guides a blind young man who loves her, until a doctor offers to give him sight.
• Trafalgar by Benito Pérez Galdós (1873): An old man remembers being a ship's boy at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The first of Galdós's Episodios nacionales.
• Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte by Horacio Quiroga (1917): Stories of love, madness and death, many set in the Argentine jungle of Misiones: A la deriva, El almohadón de pluma, La gallina degollada.
• Cuentos de amor by Emilia Pardo Bazán (1898): Forty-three short, often ironic stories about love in all its forms, from the great Galician writer.
• Cuentos valencianos by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1896): Stories of the farmers, fishermen and rogues of the huerta around Valencia.
• El clavo by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1853): A judge investigates a skull pierced by a nail and finds that the case leads to the woman he loves. A short crime story.
• La barraca by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1898): A poor family takes over an abandoned farm near Valencia, and the whole huerta turns against them.
• Fábulas by Félix María de Samaniego (1781): Verse fables written for the pupils of a Basque school: the cicada and the ant, the milkmaid, the two rabbits. Simple morals, 18th-century verse.

Questions