How to Approach Learning Verb Conjugations

[blackcoffee]

I got a recommendation from Clara in her log and I hope she doesn't mind if I re-post it here:

I use an app called Ella for a few minutes a day here and there, and I think it really helps to keep conjugations fresh in my mind. There are tons of conjugation apps, and I only tried 2 others (sorry can't remember their names). One of them was much more configurable and powerful than Ella, but it was hideous. All of the apps I tried required payment to unlock tenses, and you really needed to pay for any of them to be usable beyond basics. Ella is expensive at $22/year, but it doesn't have ads. The others were cheaper but had ads even in the paid versions.

What I like. #4, 5 and 6 apply to all the conjugation apps I looked at and aren't special to Ella.

Simple layout, easy to use interface
Includes keys for accented characters which makes typing easy. You have to type in the answers with correct spelling, which apparently some people do not like, but I do!
You can create your own personalized list of verbs to test
Can configure moods / tenses / pronouns to test. For example you can test first person indicative present or all subjunctive mood without vosotros.
Can choose whether the infinitive form of the verb is shown or if you have to translate it from English
1000 verbs with pre-made categories such as common, regular, irregular, reflexive, -ar, -er, -ir verbs

I also have a few nitpicks. The irregular category of verbs includes verbs that are irregular in any form, so there's no way to test verbs that are irregular in a specific tense / pronoun combination. The stats are bit weird. I wish I could add my own verbs (I'm looking at you, cocer), but I also understand that would be a big ask programmatically. And it would be nice if I could create more than one list of verbs.

I've read that Conjugato is a another great conjugation app, but from what I could see, the difference between Conjugato and Ella is whether you type in the answer. I don't think Conjugato has an interface for typing answers, and Ella requires it. I prefer typing because it reinforces spelling and accentuation, but I could also see someone preferring not to.

Overall, I feel like it really helps. I still have trouble conjugating on the fly in oral speech, but I've improved a lot.

I like it - it's a really good augment to the anki since I have to type out the verbs and I have to do a little each day to keep all the tenses above 90%.

[tractor]

I'm generally not a fan of rote learning, but I have never regretted the few hours I spent on learning Spanish verb conjugations in 1987 and 88.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Same here, not a big fan of rote learning. Nevertheless, whenever there was an upcoming Spanish test in high-school, I went through all the grammar the night before. It took an hour at most, a couple of times per semester.

[siouxchief]

I used this app for French and found it brilliant. You can create a custom exercise, pick your verbs, pick the tenses you want to focus on then it will quiz you on them. Spanish version here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... rtenesfull

It will put up the English give you a few seconds to produce the French then show and read out the French. I hid the answer hints with my finger until I had tried it out loud myself first.

Just doing 5 to 10 verbs over a few nights and repeating where necessary done wonders for my ability to produce verbs quick and with the correct accent. Can't recommend it highly enough. I chose my verbs to learn based on frequency tables.

[Iversen]

OK, the OP has got a series of forms impregnated into his brain as a singsong rhyme, but is that really a problem? I still have 3 series of German prepositions and at least 2 Latin ones graved into my brain, and sometimes I run them through in a flash while speaking or writing - but now those series have become so automated and fast that they don't slow me down.

In another thread (the latest one about Krashen) I hinted that Slovenian kids wouldn't learn the complicated declension tables of their native language by heart - they would learn the forms one by one in specific contexts - like for instance the group-of-possible-endings-of-substantives after a specific preposition or as objects (done while the definition of 'object' itself slowly emerges out of chaos). It can be done, but it takes a long time - and the kids don't have any alternative. We have.

Our alternative to absorb the endings one by one, but when we have studied some inflection tables we know what to look for and we have somewhere to look when we are in doubt. I do think a bit of raw memorization is helpful, but it is just as important simply to look at the tables and try to find patterns - ANY kind of patterns. And then keep an eye on everything you read or listen to to find examples.

For instance the vowels in the present of Spanish verbs depend on the position of the stress. Okay, notice some typical patterns (like o versus ue as in "dormir" vs. "duermo") and then start looking for examples in things you in any case would have studied or amused yourself with. Doing searches for one single phenomenon through hundreds of pages in one book after the other simply takes too long time, and it is seriously boring, but simply being aware of for instance the ue-o alternation makes you notice the thing when it occurs. And in this way you can speed up the learning from input - Krashen or no Krashen.

There are a couple of specific caveats about verbal tables. For instance most grammars mix the descriptions of simple and compound verbs (including quoted tables), because they cover different syntactical situations and divide up some kind of semantic field so it is tempting to illustrate them using parallel tables. But start looking at the simple forms and the infinitive forms of regular verbs and learn the forms of the irregular auxiliary separately . you don't need to learn it over and over again for each compound form of a regular verb.

The second thing is that there aren't just regular and irregular verbs. For instance strong verbs in Germanic languages switches stem vowels, but there are some typical patterns. And Spanish has different vowels in stressed and unstressed syllables, as illustrated about. So if there are such patterns then the verbs that follow them not irregular - they are just 'alternatively regular', as a politically correct grammarian might have formulated it. Reserve the word 'irregular' for verbs then don' fit into any such pattern, maybe because they combine several different stems in their inflection.

The third and final warning is to be sceptical about denominations that only are relevant from a historical perspective. The relevant thing is which patterns you can see now, not how they came to be that way. Or otherwaise said: etymology can be great fun, but don't let it dictate your naming systems.

[Christi]

I'm also learning Spanish and I'm doing a kind of mixed approach. I'm probably not as far with Spanish as you, but so far I've learned 4 tenses and will start on the 5th tense next week.

I use a textbook so after looking at the explanation I read that chapter's accompanying text and practice the grammar by answering questions about the text.
The other thing I do is just trying to get more comprehensible input. For me this means reading easy stories. Right now I'm focusing on making my way through a couple of thin books with limited vocab and grammar.
I also do the occasional language exchange and watch the occasional movie with Spanish subs.

Sometimes I do grammar drills on spanishdict.com, but I don't do this often. Only to check how good my response rate is.

I haven't had a lot of input since I just started but this seems to work for me. This summer is going to be one of major input and I expect verb conjugation to come to me relatively easily since I will have come across them so often.

[Kraut]

When you combine Popup-Dictionary (Firefox add-on) with "123teachme" or "Scholalingua" you click on a verb in a text and tables and example sentences will pop up.

https://sites.google.com/site/hellorick ... dictionary


https://www.123teachme.com/spanish_verb ... tion/venir

https://www.scholingua.com/de/es/konjug ... s%C3%A4tze

123's sentence maker provides more example sentences

https://www.123teachme.com/translated_s ... sp/apetece

[tractor]

The third and final warning is to be sceptical about denominations that only are relevant from a historical perspective. The relevant thing is which patterns you can see now, not how they came to be that way. Or otherwaise said: etymology can be great fun, but don't let it dictate your naming systems.

Are you thinking about what we call the tenses? To the average learner I don't really think it matters if he hablado is called "pretérito perfecto", "pretérito compuesto", "pretérito perfecto compuesto" or "antepresente".

[tractor]

I do think a bit of raw memorization is helpful, but it is just as important simply to look at the tables and try to find patterns - ANY kind of patterns. And then keep an eye on everything you read or listen to to find examples.

This is a very good point. Once you recognize the patterns, there's a lot less to remember.

[mentecuerpo]

So my questions are:
1) What is the best way for "direct, random access to conjugated verbs"?
2) What is everyone's preferred method to tackle verb conjugations?

I like Glossika for "naturally" learning conjugations.

Besides learning new phrases with the correct pronunciation, the Glossika drills will undoubtedly help learn the correct conjugation of most European languages.

The A1 will bring present tense conjugations in multiple sentences.
As you progress on Glossika, you will see conjugations in different tenses.

If you pay attention to the Glossika sentence verb conjugation, your focused attention may naturally help you learn the conjugations.

Hence, as you learn pronunciation, new words, new phrases, you can learn the grammatical patterns of the language without any grammatical explanation. (You may consider a grammar book to supplement Glossika to aid your learning).

One negative, Glossika is not free, and it may be expensive for many language learners.

One positive feature, the subscription unlocks all the languages in the software.