Experdize Spanish Match Diner - Extra

How to play: the board deals each word of the taberna twice — once written properly in Spanish, once as the way it is said or as its English. Tap a tile, then tap its partner: a pair goes in, pays 100 points, and is said aloud in Spanish. Every pair you make without a mistake multiplies the next one, up to five times over, and a wrong guess counts a mistake and puts the run back to nothing — the board ends only when every pair is matched. Clear it and the clock stops; each deck keeps its own best time. Ten decks of 405 words in all.

Every noun on this board wears its article, and that is deliberate. Every Spanish noun is masculine or feminine, and the little word in front says which — so the tile reads una paella and un flan rather than the bare noun. El or la is the deck where the article itself is the question, and it teaches the rule that overrides the gender: a feminine noun beginning with a stressed a- takes the masculine article in the singular. It is el agua and el hambre — and still la aceituna, whose first syllable is unstressed, which is the control that stops a learner concluding that a- nouns are masculine. Numbers carries the join at thirty: sixteen to twenty-nine are one welded word (dieciséis, veintiuno) and thirty-one upwards are three (treinta y uno), with nothing anywhere to signal where it changes. A pair already made stays on the board faded; tap it to hear the word again.

The respellings are peninsular — cerveza is "thehr-BEH-thah", because the course is set in Barcelona and the voice reads it that way — and the CAPITALS mark the stressed syllable. This is the vocabulary Experdize Spanish Diner - Applied works with, so play it first and that taberna's orders will already make sense.