Elementary Spanish for daily routines, simple past tense, shopping, travel, and describing preferences.
Roughly 6–12 months of study.
A2 Spanish opens up the past tenses: pretérito indefinido (fui, hice, comí) for completed events and the imperfect (era, hacía, comía) for descriptions and routines. The vocabulary doubles to around 1,000 words covering daily routines, shopping, travel, weather, the body, and how to express preferences (me gusta + infinitive). Reflexive verbs (levantarse, ducharse, llamarse) become essential.
If you can describe your morning routine, recount your last vacation in simple sentences, and ask follow-up questions in conversation, you're around A2. Most learners reach A2 after 6–12 months. A2 is also DELE A2 level, the entry-level certificate accepted for Spanish nationality applications.
A2 is the level where ser vs estar finally needs to click. Don't memorize the rules; memorize ten contrastive pairs (es alto vs está cansado, es de Madrid vs está en Madrid) and let pattern-matching do the work. Spaced repetition is most useful here for verb conjugation pairs: present + preterite of the 30 most frequent verbs. Start consuming Spanish-language podcasts for beginners.