Should I learn Spanish grammar or vocabulary first?

Neither one first. Learn them together, with vocabulary leading. Start with the few hundred most common words and the handful of grammar patterns that let you put them into sentences, then grow both side by side. If you're forced to pick, pick vocabulary, because words get you understood much faster than perfect grammar does.

Why vocabulary gets the edge early

Think about what happens when a tourist says agua, por favor (water, please) with no grammar at all. They get water. Now imagine someone who knows the subjunctive perfectly but doesn't know the word for water. That one's easier to picture failing.

Early on, most of the meaning in a sentence sits in the nouns, verbs and adjectives. Grammar adds detail like who, when and how sure. You can often guess the detail from context. You can't guess a missing word.

This is also why the first words matter. The most common few hundred cover a large share of everyday speech, so which words to learn first is a better question than it sounds.

Why you can't skip grammar

The catch is that Spanish packs a lot of information into verb endings. Hablo, hablas and habla all mean different people. Hablé and hablaba are different past tenses. If you only know bare words, you'll understand less than you'd expect, and you'll struggle to say anything past a single phrase.

So you need a minimum amount of grammar early:

• Present tense of regular and a few common irregular verbs
• Noun and adjective agreement (la casa blanca, el libro blanco)
• A way to talk about the future, which can be as simple as voy a plus a verb - see voy a vs the future tense
• Basic question words and negation

That's a small list. It's a few weeks of work, not a year.

What the order looks like in practice

Here's a rough shape I'd suggest:

1. Weeks 1-4: the most common words and present tense, learned through short phrases and sentences, not isolated lists.
2. Months 2-4: past tenses, object pronouns, and a steady stream of new words from things you listen to and read.
3. Later: the trickier stuff like the subjunctive, once you've seen it often enough to recognize it.

Notice that grammar isn't studied in a vacuum. You learn a pattern, then immediately meet it in sentences.

Learn grammar through examples

My take is that grammar rules work best as a way to explain things you've already seen, not as something to memorize in advance. When you hear Me gusta el café (I like coffee) ten times, the rule about gustar makes sense when you finally read it. When you read the rule first, it's just noise.

That doesn't mean skip explanations. A quick explanation, followed by lots of examples, beats either one alone.

Short stories are a good source of those examples. In Langtok, the app I built, you can tap any word in a story to check it, so you meet each pattern in real sentences before you ever read the rule.

How much grammar is enough?

Less than most people fear. If you're curious, I wrote about how much grammar you need to speak Spanish. The short version is that a working command of the main tenses gets you very far.

So don't wait to finish a grammar book before you read or listen to anything. Start both on the same day, and let your reading and listening show you which rules you actually need.