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.
Bulgarian Verbs.jpg
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.