Learn Hardcore Spanish (Latin America): Regresa a casa después de la escuela.

Regresa is the third-person singular (he/she/it) present tense form of regresar, meaning he/she returns. Since the sentence is describing someone returning home, we use the conjugated form regresa rather than the infinitive.

Is “Regresa a casa” interchangeable with “Vuelve a casa”?

Yes, regresar and volver both mean to return in Spanish, so regresa and vuelve can be used equivalently in many contexts. Sometimes regresa sounds like a direct return, while vuelve might be more common in everyday speech, but they generally convey the same idea.

Why do we say “a casa” without an article, rather than “a la casa”?

When referring to going home or returning home in Spanish, the phrase is typically a casa without the article la. It’s an idiomatic usage that literally means to (the) home, but the article is omitted by convention.

Why is it “después de la escuela” instead of just “después la escuela”?

The preposition de (of) is required in Spanish after después when it’s followed by a noun, so you must say después de la escuela (after school). Without de, the phrase would be grammatically incorrect.

Can “después de la escuela” mean something else, like “after finishing high school”?

The phrase después de la escuela usually means after the school day ends for that day. To specify something like after finishing high school, you’d usually make it more explicit, for example: después de terminar la preparatoria.