Sabes is a spaced repetition drill app for adults who have tried Duolingo and still cannot speak Spanish in conversation.
Gamified apps teach you to tap the right bubble. They do not teach you to produce language. Sabes is a drill tool. You see a prompt, you recall the answer, the algorithm schedules the next review. That is it.
The same loop runs across all three practice types: see the prompt, produce the answer, rate your recall. The algorithm schedules the next review. That is it.
No minigames. No animations. No distraction. Just the words you need to know, shown at the exact right time.
554 drill cards covering ser vs. estar, por vs. para, the subjunctive, reflexive verbs, pronouns, and more. Structured by CEFR level. A1 modules are free; all 44 unlock with Premium.
From presente and pretérito indefinido through to imperfecto, futuro, condicional, and subjuntivo presente. Mapped to CEFR levels. Free tier includes presente and indefinido. All 6 tenses unlock with Premium.
Frequency-ranked and organised by band (Top 100 through Top 2,000). Drill the words you are most likely to encounter in real speech, not the ones that happen to fit a themed lesson.
Cards you find easy space out quickly; cards you find hard come back sooner. The scheduling is automatic. You rate your recall, the app does the rest.
Choose your dialect in onboarding. Vosotros forms for Spain (Castilian); ustedes for Latin America. You can change this at any time in Settings.
The complete conjugation database ships inside the app. No network connection during a drill session. No account to create. No data collected. Everything stays on your device.
Every drill card shows where the word comes from. Latin roots, Arabic loanwords, connections to English. Learn why Spanish sounds the way it does. No competitor builds etymology into the drill itself.
Tap any example sentence for a word-by-word grammar analysis. See the tense, person, gender, and part of speech of every word in context. Grammar explained at the exact moment you need it.
Ser vs. estar, por vs. para, stem-changing patterns. Brief explanations appear on every relevant drill card, exactly when you need them. Not buried in a lesson you have already forgotten.
Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve has been reproduced in hundreds of studies since 1885. Memory decays in a predictable pattern. Spaced repetition counteracts that decay by reintroducing information at the precise moment before it would be forgotten. Every interval in Sabes is calculated, not guessed.
Gamification is not compatible with optimal learning intervals. When an app awards XP for completing a lesson, it incentivises breadth over depth. A user who taps through three new topics earns more points than one who drills the same 20 cards to true fluency. Sabes does not track points. It tracks mastery.
A card is mature when you have correctly recalled it across multiple spaced intervals. A tense is mastered when 80% of its cards are mature. There is no shortcut and no inflation: your progress chart reflects where you actually stand.
Sabes uses a modified SM-2 algorithm, one of the most studied methods in memory science. The modification: a 21-day interval cap for the first 10 reviews on any card, which prevents the system from spacing reviews too aggressively before a pattern is consolidated.
Start free. Upgrade when you are ready.
The paywall never interrupts a drill session. If your free limit runs out, the app tells you at the start of the next session, not mid-card. Cancel any time from iOS Settings. Previous purchases restored from Settings > Restore Purchases.
"I have been using Duolingo for two years. I tried Sabes for one week and conjugated more correctly in conversation than I had in two years of daily streaks."
Beta tester [name and role to be added]
"The frequency-first approach made an immediate difference. I stopped wasting time on verbs I would never use."
Beta tester [name and role to be added]
"No streak. No owl nagging me. Just the cards I need to review and a progress chart that actually means something."
Beta tester [name and role to be added]
Download Sabes. Choose your dialect. Pick your tenses and grammar modules. Begin.
Cancel any time. No account required.