Making some notes for my plan to use FSI Basic Spanish "presentation of pattern" drills to ease the "day one shock" of the Anki Spanish Ultimate Conjugation deck.
FSI Basic Spanish presents verbs in groups. There are a lot of irregular present tense verbs that are gradually introduced in units 1 - 23. The course has 55 units.
Since I'm working on finishing unit 21, I'm not going to layout where the present tense shows up in the course, but suffice it to say that unit 23 mainly drills irregular present tense verbs.
27.21 - Imperative (Imperative and subjunctive have the same conjugation for several persons).
31.21 - Past Progressive
36.21 - Present Subjunctive
37.21 - Present Subjunctive
38.21 - Present Subjunctive
40.21 - Present Subjunctive
41.21 - Present Subjunctive
42.21 - Present Subjunctive
44.21 - Irregular -do forms (past participle)
45.21 - Past Perfect (indirectly covered in Anki deck)
47.21.1 - Past Subjunctive
47.21.2 - Present Perfect and Past Perfect Subjunctives (indirectly covered by Anki deck)
48.21.1 - Conditional and Conditional Perfect
49.21 - Future and Future Perfect
50.21.1 - Past Subjunctive
50.21.2 - Past Subjunctive
51.21.1 - Indicative and Subjunctive
51.21.2 - Future and Conditional
51.21.3 - Passive Construction (why not?)
53.21.1 - Irregular -ndo forms
53.21.3 - Vosotros forms
54.21.3 - Vos forms
Hm. So that's not all of the "presentation of pattern" sections, but it covers most of the verb conjugation presentations.
FSI Basic Spanish uses "presentation of pattern" to introduce whatever grammatical concept they are going to drill next. Many of the "patterns" get introduced gradually in earlier drills and dialogs, but they are drilled in a very specific way that makes it seem you don't have to know what's going on to do them properly. Example, they introduce
poder conguations in such a way that you don't realize
puedo, puedes, puede, pueden are actually irregular. That is, they postpone using
podemos, or if they use it, they don't make you change the "person number" in the drill and you may not realize, "same verb, something different is going on". What you do learn is, "I can". Then in a later drill, possibly, "We can". In that "we can" drill, all the forms will be things we can do.
We can wash the red car. We can clean the white car. We can sell the white car. We can sell a white car. We can sell a white house. We can sell a white horse.
That's why FSI can be fun at times.
But it's got thinking maybe I'll hit all of those
hijos de la..., I mean "presentations of pattern" in a parallel run at FSI. That is, don't give up on the unit per week progress I've been making, but see if doing the dialogs and presentations of patterns capture my interest. Fortunately, I'm already familiar with most of the dialogs from when I focused on the course about 15 years ago.
One final point. I've heard a few different polyglots say you have to get to a certain level, approximately C1 to not lose it all if you quit using the language for a number of years. Should have kept going just a little bit longer back in the day. Somewhere I heard, "don't quit before the miracle". I guess they were referring to C1. (whether you tested for it or just have most of those capabilities).
P.S. AlternativesCould suspend the Future Subjunctive, Vos, and Vosotros to make "day one" with the conjugation deck less brutal. They are toughest cards for me. Would have to do a little arithmetic when adding a new verb, but that's easier than learning unfamiliar conjugations.
Could develop an interest in grammar videos in Spanish, particularly those that cover the subjunctive, conditional, etc.
Could let the Anki conjugation deck slide. It puts a heavy weight on the "learning" strand. That time might be better used just focusing on FSI as designed and Anki for vocabulary.
Will see what tomorrow feels like with the Anki Conjugation deck.
The next day... A beautiful thing happened. Nothing has appeared in the Ultimate Conjugation queue. Not sure if that's a setting like, "the day starts at 8am or later" or just divine intervention. I generally have my Anki day start at midnight. I tend to go to bed early and get up early. But if the queue reappears, and I'm really hoping it doesn't, I'll definitely filter out Future Subjunctive, Vos, and Vosotros for now.