- Translation tools
- Media recommendations for learning Spanish
- Podcasts
- Books
- Streaming services
- [Similar projects by other people?] – redirects to my “About” page
- Behind the scenes web/code tools
- Web tools
- Programming language scripts
- R code: image-to-text capture with R package “tesseract” (6/2023)
- Javascript code (updated 11/2022)
- Perl code (last version 11/2016, now retired)
Translation tools
Bilingual or multilingual dictionaries and language resources:
- WordReference: Spanish-English – Bilingual dictionary. Also includes a monolingual Spanish dictionary and thesaurus. Recommended.
- Collins Dictionary: Inglés-Español – Bilingual dictionary. Recommended.
- SpanishDictionary.com – Bilingual dictionary.
- Linguee.com – This website allows you to input a phrase, then cross-references occurrences of the phrase across media with available translations. This allows you to see how real people have translated the phrase before. It works best if you are already at least semi-bilingual. Recommended for advanced students.
- Bab.La: Loving Languages – Translation dictionary with automatic examples from the media.
Monolingual dictionaries and resources:
- Thesaurus.com (English) – Useful for finding the word with the right connotation.
- The Free Dictionary: Spanish – Monolingual Spanish dictionary that imports definitions from different sources. It includes some Mexican-only Nahuatl-derived words, though the definitions are limited. For example, cempasúchil (Aztec marigold) is a flower in the Tagetes genus, but they don’t mention that detail even though it would define it much better than describing it as a “yellow or orange” flower.
- RAE: Diccionario de la lengua española – the Royal Spanish Academy’s monolingual Spanish dictionary. Great for standard Spanish and occasionally has Latin American meanings. It includes some Mexican-only Nahuatl-derived words like cempasúchil (Aztec marigold) with a slightly different definition than The Free Dictionary.
- WordReference: Spanish definition – Monolingual Spanish dictionary. Lacks Mexican-only Nahuatl-derived words.
- Diccionario Latinoamericano de la Lengua Española – Latin American monolingual Spanish dictionary. [Update 11/2023: searching doesn’t seem to work anymore? I’ll wait to see if it’s fixed. Currently it is not as useful as it used to be.]
- Conjugation.org and WordReference Spanish Verb Conjugation – I use verb conjugation websites as spell checkers also.
- SpanishChecker.com – spellchecker provides tips to manually check homophones and accents.
- One Look’s Reverse Dictionary – Also for finding words.
- None of the monolingual Spanish dictionaries have other Mexican-only words like yerbaniz/yierbaniz/hierbaniz (mint marigold, Tagetes lucida).
- Merriam-Webster.com (m-w.com) – Monolingual English dictionary with definitions, etymology, and first known usage.
- Webster’s Dictionary 1828 – Older monolingual English dictionary. Useful occasionally when I am translating old songs with poetic lyrics (e.g. Julio Jaramillo’s mid-20th century romance songs).
- Spanish Texting Abbreviations and Slang
Etymology websites:
- DECEL – Diccionario Etimológico Castellano En Línea: Origen de las Palabras – Spanish language etymology website from Chile. To search, type your word in the box that says “Busca aquí” (Search here) and click the magnifying glass button.
- El Castellano: La Página del idioma español – Spanish language etymology website from Spain. To search, scroll down to the section Buscador (Search Engine) and type the word you want, then elect to search “www.elcastellano.org” not “web” and hit the Enviar (Send) button.
- Etymonline.com: Online Etymology Dictionary – for English. If you don’t find it here, use Merriam-Webster.
Grammar Resources:
- About.com: Spanish Homophones – Solo and sólo are both pronounced SO-lo, so why does one need an accent? Look up Spanish homophones (words pronounced the same way).
- Update 2010: the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy) proposed Spanish grammar rules changes such as removing useless accents, so sólo doesn’t need an accent anymore.
- Not everyone is happy about all the changes: “Rebelling Against Spain, This Time With Words“, New York Times, Nov 25, 2010.
- Some of the changes were rolled back or made optional, including whether we need to distinguish between solo and sólo.
Media recommendations for learning Spanish
Podcast recommendations:
- El Gran Apagón (The Great Outage) [Spotify, 2016-2018] – a science fiction podcast from Spain about the world after intense solar flares bring about total electrical outages, plunging the world into darkness. It has a radio-style format that reminds me of the War of the Worlds radio drama. It follows the aftermath of the solar storms and investigates how governments respond and who knew what ahead of time.
Book recommendations:
- Eduardo Galeano’s Memoria del Fuego (Memory of Fire) trilogy – poetic fan fiction about Latin American history with beautiful literary Spanish. Galeano writes imagined first person accounts of real moments in Latin American history, so you get poetic short stories and a historical education at the same time. My favorite is the 3rd book (El siglo del viento or “Centrury of the Wind”) which focuses on the 20th century. Each story is short (usually 1-4 paragraphs) so it is an accessible resource for Spanish learners who want something more advanced than their textbooks and news articles, but not yet full novels.
Streaming services:
Here are my reviews of different streaming services available in the United States, from the perspectives of “I want to show Spanish dubs to my parents” and “it would be nice to re-learn some of the French I’ve forgotten.”
- Disney+ is the best for language learning. They offer a wide selection and almost everything has multiple language audio/subtitle tracks. They are the most generous streaming service for multi-language households. The regular subscription plan gives you access to every available language.
- Tubi has a lot of free Spanish-dubbed and Spanish original language movies.
- Hulu has Spanish dubs for several movies and tv shows, but it makes them very difficult to find. Search for Hispanic & Latin American Stories hub which may or may not show up on the main “Hubs” page, depending on how Hulu is feeling that day. Also good luck getting Spanish dubs and English subtitles together! Hulu separates languages completely. For example Modern Family and Una Familia Moderna are listed as separate shows. Not very friendly for multi-language households or language learners.
- Netflix is so-so. They often provide multiple language subtitles, but non-English dubs are rare for United States accounts. Combining Netflix with a VPN may work better.
- Amazon Prime is the worst for language learning. They hate providing extra languages for free. I am still mad that I purchased Knives Out during the holidays specifically because the description page said it offered a Spanish dub, then after purchase I could only see the original English audio. I wanted to show it to my Spanish-speaking parents for our movie night!
Personally, if I am learning a language, I like combining the non-English audio and English subtitles. I accidentally learned a little bit of Japanese (words and phrases) by watching lots of fansubbed anime in high school and college. Every tv show and movie you watch will teach you different terms, depending on the genre and topics.
Behind the scenes web/code tools
Editing steps to consider:
- Replace accented characters and special grammar characters with their html code (e.g. á for á) to prevent special characters from becoming boxes in some browsers. If you see any character boxes in songlations.com, it’s because I made edits after my typical cleanup step. Let me know and I’ll fix them!
- Capitalize the beginning of each line.
- Add a text block header before the lyrics (e.g. “<h2>Translation:</h2>”) to reduce typing.
Web tools:
- RegEx101.com for regular expression testing – I use this to practice text editing patterns for the code I use to clean up lyrics and special characters before posting.
- Remove or replace line breaks
Programming language scripts:
R code: Image-to-text capture with R package “tesseract”
- For really quick image-to-text capture. I use this for new releases and other songs with a low internet presence. Sometimes I find the lyrics somewhere I cannot copy/paste, so I take a screen capture and convert to text so I can edit.
JavaScript code: Songlations post formatting
- To help me format posts before I start translating, I wrote an HTML document with textbox inputs for various parts of the post (title, title translation, YouTube link, genre, country, lyrics, etc). I made buttons for JavaScript-transformed outputs that I can paste into WordPress. It saves me time so I don’t need to manually format everything. To use, copy the following code to a text editor, save with extension .html, and open in a web browser.
Perl code: Songlations post formatting
- Great for text editing (the best!) but opening and closing input and output files got annoying after a while so I switched to JavaScript. My last Perl version (2016.11) assumes an input file song_input.rtf saved in the same location as the code, and native Windows program wordpad.exe available to open it. You can comment out the system() functions and just manually edit the input file if you don’t have WordPad.
Last edited: November 12, 2025
Songlations 