Spanish Accents & Spelling: the little marks that keep tripping you

Four lessons on diacritic accents, common misspellings, stress rules and qué vs. que, backed by an AI tutor that grades your written Spanish accent by accent.

Accent marks in Spanish are not decoration. Some distinguish two otherwise identical words: sí (yes) and si (if), tú (you) and tu (your), él (he) and el (the), qué as a question word and que as "that". Others tell you which syllable to stress, which is why hablo (I speak) and habló (he spoke) are different tenses with different subjects. The rules for where the stress falls are among the most consistent in the language, and once you know them you can predict the accent on words you have never seen.

Learners drop accents because they seem optional (you are usually still understood) and because typing them is a nuisance. The cost shows up later: written Spanish that reads as careless, tenses that get misread, and a cluster of related spelling errors (b/v, h, ll/y, c/s/z) that Latin American pronunciation gives no clue about because the letters sound identical. A short set of rules and a habit of checking are all it takes, but the habit needs feedback.

Juntos gives that feedback on every message. The AI tutor scores your writing 0–100 and shows the corrected spelling, and sí vs. si, missing opening ¿ and spelling/accent are among the patterns detected automatically and tracked in your Error Bank. The four lessons here cover the diacritic pairs, the most common misspellings, the stress rules (agudas, graves, esdrújulas) and the question-word accents, and spaced-repetition reviews bring back exactly the words you keep getting wrong.

Does it have an accent? 30 words learners ask about

The quick answers, with the reason. Every one follows from the stress rule in lesson 1, apart from the pairs where the accent only tells two words apart.

Not sure about a word in a whole sentence? Paste it into the free Spanish grammar and spell checker: it flags missing accents and the ones that change the meaning.

What's in this course

1. Diacritic accents that change meaning, sí/si, tú/tu, él/el, más/mas
2. Common misspellings, Words you've slipped on
3. Where the stress falls, The 3 rules that explain every accent mark
4. qué vs que, dónde vs donde, Question words and their plain twins

Each lesson below is the same material used inside the Juntos app, with two of its exercises to try. In the app every lesson has the full exercise set, and the AI tutor grades your conversation practice against what you have learned.

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