Learn less at one time. Use more in real life.

Living in Puerto Rico and learning Puerto Rican Spanish as a family with small children was the inspiration behind Tervan. What started as simple vocabulary and phrase lists for our family has grown because of our travels and friends from many places.

Tervan started with a simple frustration: most Spanish learning material teaches "textbook Spanish," and then real conversation — especially the fast, warm, regionally specific Spanish spoken in Puerto Rico — sounds nothing like it.

The Puerto Rican Spanish book was built for families and travelers who want to be understood, not to sound like a tourist. Every phrase is chosen because people actually say it — including the accent features (softened s, pa'/to'/na') that most courses skip entirely, and the Taíno-rooted words that are now just everyday Spanish.

This website is an early, deliberately small demonstration of where that content is headed next: the same underlying vocabulary and phrases, reused across a book, a website, and eventually an interactive app — one canonical source, many presentations, per this project's own architecture (docs/architecture/README.md).

Have a correction, a regional expression that's missing, or a question about the book? Get in touch.