question about conjugating verbs as you progress

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miket12
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question about conjugating verbs as you progress

Postby miket12 » Fri Feb 03, 2023 7:30 pm

I'm working thru the Michel Thomas Italian program and am learning some of the verb tenses. I'm also entering sentences into anki for practice. I have a question about what mental model I should have about how to conjugate verbs based on what those who've progressed to intermediate or better levels do.

It seems like there are at least two mental models for how conjugation will eventually feel:
  • some very common verbs (to be, to want, etc) have been memorized as well as examples from both standard and irregular verbs and on the fly any verb you use less often can be conjugated almost without thought, although the better you get at the language the more verbs you know in multiple tenses
  • thru practice you've learned many verbs and many/most of their conjugations so you just know the appropriate conjugation most of the time and having to think about conjugating is uncommon
I hope I've explained what I'm asking. I only speak English, a barely conjugated language, so I'm trying to understand what it feels like to someone who speaks a language with richer conjugations.
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Re: question about conjugating verbs as you progress

Postby Iversen » Fri Feb 03, 2023 9:03 pm

My first foreign language was English which hasn't got much in the way of verbal morphology, but after that I learnt German in school and Italian and Spanish at home, using text books. In text books you are presented with tiny droplets of information, and nowadays I want to see beforehand what there is to learn before I dive down into the specific areas of grammar. But I learnt Latin with a heavy emphasis on grammar, and when I studied French at the university during 70s I had already changed my methods: now my main systematic learning tool had become to write my own tables - actually I wrote my own mini grammar for the whole French grammar, not only the verbal morphology, but also its syntax. But in this thread we speak conjugation, and then the emphasis is of course on tables.

So since I restarted my language learning around 2006 I have tried an early stage to summarize what there is to learn, i.e. the different tempora and modes and infinite forms for the regular verbs and lists with the most common irregular ones. At that stage I don't really try to memorize everything, but I keep my notes within reach when I write short texts to train my active skills - and also when I just sit down and try to think. I knew the main Germanic and Romance languages (and Latin) when I left the university in 1981, whereas I basically started from scratch with Greek and the Slavic languages in the present milennium, and here writing "green sheets" with the basic grammar has become an important part of my learning strategy (see a random example below). I try to think and write in those languages an early stage (even though the result is a miserable patchwork of holes and errors), and to do that you need a vocabulary and some grammar. I do wordlists to get the vocabulary, but constructing and then using the green sheets give me the essential grammar - anything more advanced can wait.

But there is a caveat here: OF COURSE you can't learn to use or even understand a language just from doing wordlists (or Anki) and making grammar sheets. So get a feeling for the living langage I study bilingual printouts from day one where I not only collect new words, but also try to understand why every single word has the form it has - and the green sheets (or until those are ready: the short grammar overviews in language guides or on Wikipedia) help me to do that. I only start to do extensive reading (or listen to speech on the fly) when I have the capacity to understand a text or speech without making too many wild guesses and without looking all the words up.

On the other had I do accept that there are things that don't need to be studied in a systematic way. For instance I know Italian fairly well, and therefore I can more or less work my way through texts in its dialects or Sardic. And here I don't try to learn the grammar (although I did once read a grammar for one of the Sardic dialects just for fun during a trip to Sardinia). I know that I won't ever be using these dialects or languages actively, and then it's OK to rely on some knowledge and a fair amount of guesswork. I would never do that with a language I claimed to study.

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Re: question about conjugating verbs as you progress

Postby rdearman » Sat Feb 04, 2023 10:03 am

Actually, English has as many or maybe even more conjugations. It is simply that you're used to them. English also has lots of irregular verbs. Italian is much more consistent than either French or English.
  • I am quiet
  • You are quiet
  • He is quiet
  • She is quiet
  • We are quiet
  • They are quiet

Or irregular tense conjugations like:
  • Bite
  • Bit
  • Bitten

miket12 wrote:some very common verbs (to be, to want, etc) have been memorized as well as examples from both standard and irregular verbs and on the fly any verb you use less often can be conjugated almost without thought, although the better you get at the language the more verbs you know in multiple tenses
thru practice you've learned many verbs and many/most of their conjugations so you just know the appropriate conjugation most of the time and having to think about conjugating is uncommon

You mostly have to memorise the irregular verbs. You learn regular verb conjugations quite quickly, after all they are regular and consistent. But irregular verbs, like in English, have no rhyme or reason. Luckily, there aren't that many irregular verbs in Italian. The problem is that they are the most common ones. My experience is that I spent a long time memorising various conjugations and forms, but then as I grew more familiar with the language I started to get to the point where I knew when I wasn't conjugating things correctly because they didn't "sound right" which I said them. So my advice would be to focus on memorising the common irregular verbs and meanwhile ensure you know the regular form well.

I rarely think about verb conjugation when I'm speaking in Italian. I do sometimes struggle with the future tense, subjunctive and conditional forms of the verbs, but that is because I don't use them as frequently so sometimes need to stop and have a little think, or ask. Which is why my most used phrase in Italian is probably still:
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Re: question about conjugating verbs as you progress

Postby Iversen » Sat Feb 04, 2023 12:06 pm

The thing that makes the alleged number of English conjugations swell is the compund tenses (and the problem is accentuated by a not particularly logical naming system for them) - but the number of different forms for any given verb is strictly limited. There is not even a system with perfective and imperfective single-word forms as in the Romance language or pairs of perfective or imperfective verbs as in the Slavic languages. So it's more about learning patterns than forms.

Looking across the verbs there are very few truly irregular ones (like to be), but many who just differ by a vowel shift (e.g. I run, I ran), but haven't got any ending in the past tense - a system called 'strong' that is common to all Germanic languages. There are some 7 or 8 different patterns to choose from here, and you just have to remember which one is valid for a given verb (rDearman's bite/bit also follows this system in spite of the -e that is a purely orthographic phenomenon). Again you memorize a pattern instead of six different forms (1,2,3 singular and plural). And many verbs follow the 'weak' pattern with retained vowel, but an ending which always is the same in the one and only synthetic past tense. And no one-word future or conditional.

So English (and Danish and Dutch, which don't even have anything like the annoying 3p sing.-s of English) is morphologically relatively simple, and thanks for that. The bottomside of this is the complexity of the bottom-level syntax which ye Anglophones have got in the form of compound verbal 'forms'.
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Re: question about conjugating verbs as you progress

Postby Cainntear » Tue Feb 07, 2023 8:29 am

miket12 wrote:I'm working thru the Michel Thomas Italian program and am learning some of the verb tenses. I'm also entering sentences into anki for practice. I have a question about what mental model I should have about how to conjugate verbs based on what those who've progressed to intermediate or better levels do.

I'm sceptical about the whole concept of what you're doing. What MT does is aim at directly training automated skill, and there's a potential that entering sentence into Anki preempts the automation and switches to memorisation. I've posted at some length in this thread discussing memorisation about my conversion from a philosophy of "memorise now so that the reference 'book' is in your brain; learn later using the memorised stuff" to the idea that my goal as a teacher is to train the learner without relying on eidetic memorisation of everything, and that's something I learnt from learning language with MT... and with struggling to learn from in-name-only "MT method" courses that presented too much so that I would end up memorising short lists of things and having to "look up" the form I wanted in the memorised list (well actually, I didn't talk about that bit). I was absolutely astounded with MT, and right now I'm suffering for a brain injury (that I'm hoping I'll recover from, but that's not certain) which means I have a horrendous memory but I'm still dead good at the languages I've already learnt, but am in a bit of fear about whether I'll be able to learn new ones because of the need for memorisation in almost all learning materials and almost all teacher-led classes.
Last edited by Cainntear on Tue Feb 07, 2023 5:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: question about conjugating verbs as you progress

Postby Cainntear » Tue Feb 07, 2023 8:48 am

rdearman wrote:
miket12 wrote:some very common verbs (to be, to want, etc) have been memorized as well as examples from both standard and irregular verbs and on the fly any verb you use less often can be conjugated almost without thought, although the better you get at the language the more verbs you know in multiple tenses
thru practice you've learned many verbs and many/most of their conjugations so you just know the appropriate conjugation most of the time and having to think about conjugating is uncommon

You mostly have to memorise the irregular verbs. You learn regular verb conjugations quite quickly, after all they are regular and consistent. But irregular verbs, like in English, have no rhyme or reason. Luckily, there aren't that many irregular verbs in Italian. The problem is that they are the most common ones.


Is this a problem...? Studies have found that irregular verbs have good reason to be irregular -- they're just plain quicker to use. Irregular conjugations take roughly half the time (for native speakers!) to recall that regular conjugations do, because they are treated as a single unitary word; as such, if "be" was a regular verb, each of "I be", "you be" and "he/she/it bes" would take longer to recall than "I am", "you are" and "he/she/it is". Similarly, "I/you/he/she/it/we/they beed" would be easier to memorise than "I/he/she/it was, you/we/they were", but the problem is that memorisation essentially leads to a need to "look up" the memorised information, and looking up conjugation tables means that you as a learner are making irregular verbs slower to access than regular ones, which thoroughly defeats the purpose that irregular verbs evolved to fulfil. This is a major problem in teaching, as teachers rely on memorisation rather than simply repeating the irregular verbs enough for students to develop automaticity. This is why MT introduces the irregular verbs he uses one form at a time, and repeats them far more than any of the irregular verbs he uses: he may have developed his system long before electronic brain scans were available, but he clearly implicitly recognised that looking up irregular verbs in memorised lists slowed learners down, and turned the things that native speakers find easy into a difficult thing -- a nightmare, even -- for learners.
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