Being the noob that I am, it took me a few of my rare spare hours to figure out what I was doing wrong with org-drill (sorry Paul!)
at: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html it says Load the file spanish.org. load? m-x load-file /path/to/spanish.org will give (invalid-read-syntax "#") and m-x org-drill will immediately finish with 0 results. So, that error (invalid-read-syntax...) sent me on a goose chase. Amusing, but quite time-consuming. It is not "load" but "find file" as in C-x f /path/to/spanish.org Maybe that could be changed, or clearified in the docs. Gijs But now that i got it working, I shall start anew on my French! yay