Core survival Spanish: greetings, pronouns, basic verbs (ser, estar, tener, ir), numbers, colors, and everyday objects.
Roughly 0–6 months of study.
A1 Spanish covers the survival core: greetings, basic introductions, numbers, days, time, family, and the most frequent verbs (ser, estar, tener, haber, ir, hacer). You meet gendered nouns (-o masculine, -a feminine, mostly) and the difference between formal usted and informal tú. Around 500 active words gets you through tourist situations and basic chat.
If you can introduce yourself in Spanish, ask for the price, count, and order food, you're around A1. Most learners reach A1 in 60–90 hours of study. Speakers of other Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese) often move faster because cognates carry a lot of vocabulary; English speakers benefit from thousands of Latin-derived cognates too.
At A1 the trap is conjugation overwhelm. Resist trying to memorize full conjugation tables for irregular verbs; focus on first-person singular and third-person forms (yo, él/ella) since those dominate beginner conversation. Use spaced repetition for noun gender (el problema vs la mano) since gender errors are sticky once learned wrong. 5–10 words per day, reviewed daily.