Does verb drilling exercise can help to make conjugations automatic?

[sinpisto]

Does verb drilling exercise can help to make conjugations automatic and help speak better when leaning a foreign language?

would it make a positive impact as opposed to just do the natural way with massive exposure and not trying to deliberately learn conjugation by doing workbooks and drills?

I am curious after I read the post on AI, and a member saying that he was learning Latin by doing drills to save time dou to his busy life schedule. If I remember correctly, he said analyzing grammar was not enough for him and had to do lots of drilling verb conjugations to get it automatic in his brain. (I imagine Latin is hard with declensions and cases).

[Cainntear]

I don't think it makes them automatic, but it certainly helps to.

When I was at school, I used the drills to help me remember the pattern, and then I would look up the pattern in my memory when trying to make sentences. The more sentences I said, the more automatically I could do it.

I still do this, but far less. When I started Spanish, I used a course by Michel Thomas, and in that I didn't hav to learn the rules, because the teacher was scheduing the practice in a way to get me to learn the patterns inuitively.

My view of drilling changed over time. I now feel that the most basic drills only help at the very start, and they should be done so that you can do more sophisticated drills. Everything should always get harder. If you can't translate a big sentence, it doesnt help to go back to I go, you go, he/she/it goes...

[jeffers]

Everyone needs to find what works for them, but the number one factor is that the worst method is the one which makes you quit.

Some people object to working on conjucation tables and drills because when you are talking or writing you have to run through the conjugations in your head to find the correct one. This is true the first few times, but if you keep working on your conjugations AND keep trying to use them, eventually you won't have to think through the conjugation tables to find the right one, you will just know it from experience. So why bother learning the tables or drilling? To get you to that point quicker and with more confidence.

Here's an example from my work on Italian right now. Originally I was working with the Assimil textbook, and I copied several conjugations into Anki to review them as a whole (e.g. front: avere, reverse: io ho, tu hai, lei ha, noi abbiamo, voi avete, loro hanno). It was dull and sometimes frustrating, and I later moved to working on conjucation drills using Linguno https://www.linguno.com/. In these drills you are given an infinitive verb and you have to type the correct form to fit in a sentence. At first when I had to type a specific form of a verb I would run through the table in my head, but after I'd worked on a verb a few times I didn't have to do this any more. Now, Linguno itself is a drill and not exactly real life, so I expect that the first few times I try to write or speak a specific verb form I might still have to run through the conjugation list in my head. I said the first few times, but in reality it might be the first dozen times, but it doesn't matter, if I keep using them the will eventually come to me naturally.

It is probably possible to learn the forms the "natural way", but I suspect that doing it that way you will always wonder if you got it right because you will have a strong but fuzzy recollection of the verb forms.

In short, there are two good reasons to drill verbs:

• To speed up the process of learning them,
• To improve your precision with them.

However, drilling in isolation is probably a waste of time, and this is the straw man that people who object to grammar drills are attacking. If all you do is memorize single words of vocabulary and conjugation tables, you are just learning random facts with little connection to reality.

EDIT: dang, Cainntear basically said the same thing as me, ahead of me, and with a much more consise explanation.
EDIT 2: changed "meth" to "method".

[Le Baron]

Pretty much anything you do over and over again becomes familiar and a reflex action if you do it enough.

Personally I'm not keen on going over tables or bald conjugations. I'd rather fit them into sentences. Though I did run over tables for the most common and basic verbs in Spanish.

Other than that I've relied on verbs with similar endings which conjugate the same way.

[sinpisto]

I make mistakes with my Italian conjugations, and I want to slow down and see the patterns of my mistakes so that I avoid repeating the same ones over and over.

I have noticed that conjugation mistakes, even though not fatal to communication, do not really sound right when speaking.

I know that a workbook approach can be boring and demotivating for me, and I have avoided doing these exercises, but I am considering doing the drills in workbooks to help me improve my conjugations when I speak.

I am pretty fluent in Italian, but I make mistakes. I mean that I just speak without any problems, and my brain finds the words, and people understand me without any problems, but I want to polish it, and doing the same things I do will give me the same results (the concept of insanity, by Albert Einstein). My native Spanish also gets in the way with my Italian, naturally.

I will review the replies here with more attention and fewer distractions after work.

Thanks for the replies.

[Iversen]

I make my own grammar sheets based on one or more grammars, but I don't try to learn them by heart from upper left to bottom right. Making them is a valuable step, but after that the way to memorize the forms is to jump into different parts of the tables - for instance by looking things up when you need them for something you write yourself or when you study a text intensively. Or in other words: you learn the forms by using them for something concrete.

One good thing about my green sheets (apart from having made them myself) is that I dont' have to rummage around in a thick grammar book. Each form has a specific position on a specific sheet, and with just 2-4 sheets I can cover most of my needs. The main problem is of course to know which conjugation or declension (or gender) a certain word belongs to, but that's why the tables should be used for concrete purposes, if necessary in conjunction with a dictionary.

As a supplement it would be nice to have a list of verbs with just the necessary information to guess which part of the tables you should look at. When I learnt Latin back in the 60s we exploited the fact that all forms of most irregular verbs could be deduced from just four main forms (or three for deponent verbs). I would like to have that kind of list for all my languages. The internet page Verbix can be used to see all forms of one verb at a time (though I have problems finding those with Cyrillic alphabets), and I have a Barron's red thing with hundreds of Russian verbs, but a simple condensed list would be more useful in a pinch.

[Cainntear]

I make mistakes with my Italian conjugations, and I want to slow down and see the patterns of my mistakes so that I avoid repeating the same ones over and over.

I have noticed that conjugation mistakes, even though not fatal to communication, do not really sound right when speaking.

I know that a workbook approach can be boring and demotivating for me, and I have avoided doing these exercises, but I am considering doing the drills in workbooks to help me improve my conjugations when I speak.

The problem is that if you are bored, that suggests you're not using your brain, and the task is probably too simple. If you do tasks that are so simple that your brain switches off, well, your brain won't learn because it's switched off. The task has to be hard enough to engage your interest.

This is where MT was excellent. As you became better at conjugating a particular verb tense for a particular person and number, he would introduce new things that would keep the overall difficulty of the task at the same level, so that you had enough brainpower focused on every part of the sentence.

I am pretty fluent in Italian, but I make mistakes. I mean that I just speak without any problems, and my brain finds the words, and people understand me without any problems, but I want to polish it, and doing the same things I do will give me the same results (the concept of insanity, by Albert Einstein). My native Spanish also gets in the way with my Italian, naturally.

Yes, this is a common problem. If you can be understood, there is nothing encouraging you to do better. Going back to the very basics does not help here, because the task is just too different. If I get it right when my task is "conjugate the verb andare into the the first person plural", that mean I'm going to get it right when my task is "tell the hotel receptionist that me and my companion are going to the next town and will be late for dinner, so need to book a table in the restaurant."

[kronopio]

would it make a positive impact as opposed to just do the natural way with massive exposure and not trying to deliberately learn conjugation by doing workbooks and drills?

If by "natural" you mean how a human being learns its mother tongue, then the reality is that they learn it not only through massive exposure but also through massive *interaction*, with a dedicated teacher or many dedicated teachers speaking directly with them most of the day and showing them the world at age- and language-ability-appropriate levels. The drills would be the child says "no sabo", the dedicated teacher replies "no sé". They will say "sinmigo", the dedicated teacher replies "sin mí". There's a lot of trial and error and children are also very talkative, they're constantly using the language and whatever new word they have learned. In lieu of a dedicated teacher and constant interaction/use, I use drills and other grammar excercises that force me to use the language and etch it onto my brain. But I don't think it's either/or, both are equally important and helpful, at least in the beginning. Maybe shadowing would be a suitable replacement for the "natural way".

[Cainntear]

would it make a positive impact as opposed to just do the natural way with massive exposure and not trying to deliberately learn conjugation by doing workbooks and drills?

If by "natural" you mean how a human being learns its mother tongue, then the reality is that they learn it not only through massive exposure but also through massive *interaction*, with a dedicated teacher or many dedicated teachers speaking directly with them most of the day and showing them the world at age- and language-ability-appropriate levels. The drills would be the child says "no sabo", the dedicated teacher replies "no sé". They will say "sinmigo", the dedicated teacher replies "sin mí". There's a lot of trial and error and children are also very talkative, they're constantly using the language and whatever new word they have learned. In lieu of a dedicated teacher and constant interaction/use, I use drills and other grammar excercises that force me to use the language and etch it onto my brain. But I don't think it's either/or, both are equally important and helpful, at least in the beginning. Maybe shadowing would be a suitable replacement for the "natural way".

That's not how we learn our mother tongue. Kids are very hard to correct. Reformulations don't tend to work for first or second language correction, because it's often seen just as echoing back to show that you understand. Correcting "no sabo" as "no sé" is particularly problematic, because the usual pattern of echoing is A: "I know." B: "You know." There is no correction in that, so hearing the other person say "no sé" could even compound the problem, because you're now unintentionally confusing the person you're trying to correct by mixing up the 1st and 2nd person conjugation.

[jeffers]

...I now feel that the most basic drills only help at the very start, and they should be done so that you can do more sophisticated drills. Everything should always get harder. If you can't translate a big sentence, it doesnt help to go back to I go, you go, he/she/it goes...

This is more or less the approach I'm currently taking with Italian. For specific exercises with verbs, I started by making conjugation tables in Anki of the most common present tense forms, regular and irregular, as given in the review chapters in Assimil Italian. I then worked on the A2 drills in Linguno, which are full sentences with the verb missing, so a little more sophisticated and a little bit more like real use. That's probaly the most sophisticated I will get with drills, but at the same time I've been listening, reading, and making halting starts at writing and speaking, so I'm having to drag up the forms which I've drilled. Recently I started drilling passato prossimo, so started with just the basic "I did..." forms in Anki before moving to the drills in Linguno. Next I plan to do something similar with the future tense: learn the full conjugation tables in Anki, then work on the sentence drills in Linguno. Hopefully within 6 months or so from starting I will have drilled most of the verb forms I need.

When I first started learning languages on my own I was working on German, and the only thing I did with verbs was to try to learn the conjugation tables. Not putting the verbs into proper practice was my mistake. Later when I was learning French I went the opposite way and tried to assimilate the forms without spending much time working on conjugations. This is especially a problem with French because many of the different persons sound the same even while written quite differently. So when I was preparing for an A2 exam I had to use Kwiziq to go back and learn conjugations I had essentially been fudging for years. So now that I've started Italian I've decided to try to get a solid foundation in the verbs, but at the same time put them into practice in more sophisticated ways as time goes on. I expect this will be more successful than what I did with German and French, but only time and practice will tell.