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Verb Tense Drills in Anki | ||
Tags: Anki | Verbs/Conjugation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4851 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 16 08 December 2011 at 7:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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I was using an Anki deck with a lot of sentences for drill, but I noticed that I was learning the verb tenses based on the what the rest of the sentence said. For example, I might have a sentence that translates into English as "I see a blue car." and another that says "He saw the yellow bus." and a third that translated to "We will see the moon tonight."
You would think those would give me good practice on those three verb conjugations, but they don't. I don't even notice the form of the verb when I see the sentence, because what I learn is that the sentence about the blue car is in the present, the sentence about the yellow bus is in the past and the sentence about the moon is in the future. So I'm making a new deck with assorted identical copies of each sentence but with only the verb changed. So I might have cards like: I want to help Tom. We would have wanted to help Tom. I wanted to help Tom. They will want to help Tom. You shall have wanted to help Tom. We had wanted to help Tom. I will want to help Tom. I would have wanted to help Tom. ... I am walking to the park. Tom will walk to the park. We had been walking to the park. I was walking to the park. He has been walking to the park. I walked to the park. They will have been walking to the park. I will walk to the park. I would have walked to the park. ... These are all mixed together and presented randomly so there's no way I can cheat by associating "walk...park" with first person present tense, or "want...help" with third person future tense, and so on. Using this deck I'm finding that my mastery of Spanish verb tenses is a lot shakier than I thought. You might give it a try. By taking away all the hints your mind can use to cheat you are forced to really pay attention to those verb endings. Sure, I can rattle off the verb conjugation tables, but that's nothing more than rote repetition. To actually use those tenses on the fly I'm finding I need a lot more drill on them than I thought I did. Going both ways. But this new way is helping a lot. --gary 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| fomalhaut Groupie United States Joined 4889 days ago 80 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 2 of 16 08 December 2011 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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this is a great idea
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chrisphillips71 Groupie United States Joined 5222 days ago 64 posts - 86 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 16 08 December 2011 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You should give Verbarrator a try if you want to practice verb tenses. I think that it
is great. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6091 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 4 of 16 08 December 2011 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm trying to do a similar thing, but have limited it to around 50 of the most useful verbs, and ones
that are representative of the class. I also take special note of irregular verbs. For each verb, I have about 10 conjugations. Any less and I'd miss essential endings in the plural / singlular + masculine / feminine. 1) PRESENT: 1st person singular. Imperfective. Czekam = 'I wait / am waiting / have been waiting' 2) PRESENT: 2nd person singular. Imperfective. Czekasz = 'You wait / are waiting / have been waiting' 3) PRESENT: 3rd person plural. Imperfective. Czekają = 'They wait / are waiting / have been waiting' 4) PAST: 1st person singular. Imperfective. MALE Czekałem = I waited / was waiting / had been waiting' 5) PAST: 3rd person plural. Perfective. FEMALE Poczekały = 'They waited / have waited / had waited / finished waiting' 6) FUTURE: 2nd person singular. Imperfective. MALE Będziesz czekał = 'You are going to wait / will have been waiting' 7) FUTURE: 2nd person plural. Perfective &n bsp; Poczekacie = 'You will wait / will have waited' 8) CONDITIONAL: Ist person singular. Imperfective. MALE Czekałbym = 'I would wait / would be waiting' 9) CONDITIONAL: Ist person plural. Perfective. FEMALE Poczekałybyśmy = 'We would have waited' 10) IMPERATIVE. Perfective. Poczekaj = 'Wait!' I don't at present create whole sentences to demonstrate the tenses, but I do use 'Slownik Konwersacyjny Języka Angielskiego' by Piotr Ratajczak + Niell Harvey-Smith which has hundreds of bilingual sentences to practice with. As the conjugated verb form can look quite different to the infinitive, I have to expose myself to the verb in all it's shapes and forms. Reading is an important confirmatory activity, but in the early stages of grammar learning, I can't escape the need to drill. Drilling with Anki can get very tedious, so I only drill for 15 minutes and then give my brain a break before more drilling. If there are more fun ways to learn conjugations, I'm all ears! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4895 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 5 of 16 08 December 2011 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I had a look around for verbarrotor, and found there's a free one for Spanish. The Cnet link is here.
But can anyone point me to anything similar for French? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4995 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 6 of 16 09 December 2011 at 1:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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I found a deck for French verbs about half a year ago. It doesn't have sentences, they are not needed for that purpose in my opinion. And it works nicely.
first side: verb and tense second:the conjugation in the tense for all persons, both sg and pl 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4851 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 16 09 December 2011 at 6:10am | IP Logged | |||||
One of the reasons I'm using my new (and still growing) Anki deck is that I found existing verb decks in Spanish not to be useful for teaching fluency. When a card show something like: to have - first person plural future that takes your mind right out of the proper frame for learning to use the verbs. You may learn how to respond to that question, but that doesn't mean you've learned how to use that verb in a rapid fire live conversational setting. If you find yourself thinking in terms of grammatical tenses, numbers and persons when formulating your conversational reply then there's no way you're going to be fluent. (Which is not to say that you can't be fluent AND able to answer grammatically framed questions. I just don't think either one correlates with the other.) And memorizing the verb conjugation table reminds me of those people who can recite the alphabet, but don't know the alphabet. Ask them a question like "What letter comes before R?" and they have to go through the whole recitation in their head: "ABCDEFG......PQR.." Ah, that's it. "Q". It's the verbal equivalent of counting on your fingers. Sure you can respond to the Anki card by reciting the table, because that's what you learned. But do you know which conjugation to use, instantly, and without hesitation in rapid fire conversation. (Again, I'm sure a lot of people can do both, but again, I don't think one correlates with the other. A lot of kids can use the right verbs in their native language without even knowing what a verb conjugation table is. Yes, we should probably learn the tables, but only as an incidental aside, not as a way of achieving fluency.) I would much rather drill the verbs in life-like setting, for example: We would live in Madrid if we could. He lives in Madrid. You were living in Madrid when I met you. (vosotros) If he had been living in Madrid he could have met me. We wish we could have lived in Madrid. You are going to live in Madrid. (vosotros) You would live in Madrid if he would let you. (Ud.) He was living in Madrid when I met him. I live in Madrid. We are going to live in Madrid. You are going to live in Madrid. (tú) They were living in Madrid when they met us. We were living in Madrid when we met them. You live in Madrid. (Ud.) You were living in Madrid when I met you. (tú) You are going to live in Madrid. (Ud.) Let's live in Madrid! He is going to live in Madrid. We required that they live in Madrid. ... etc. That way if I'm about to ask someone "Was he living in Boston at the time?" (or for that matter, "Was he writing a letter at the time?") I don't have to start out by thinking, "hmmm. let me see. 'he' is third person singular, and I want the past imperfect, so let me see... vivo, vives, vive. yeah, that's it. Oh, no wait. That's the present. It's vivía, vivías, vivía I need ..." In other words, learning to associate the words "third", "person", "singular", "past", "imperfect" with "vivía" is just useless except for passing a grammar exam. (In my humble opinion.) --gary 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4895 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 8 of 16 09 December 2011 at 6:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
It should not be a case of either/or. Conjugations alone will not make you able to use a language. However, they are an efficient way to learn verb forms, and how they relate to each other. Yes, the list of verbs will not be used in conversation as such. But consider it like training. A boxer spends a lot of time hitting a speed bag, but he will never be hitting anything like it in the ring. The speed bag trains certain skills. You could learn a lot of very similar real world sentences, but unless you do at least some work on a conjugation set as a whole, you will often find yourself getting mixed up (is that the s/he form or the they form?) Learning them together helps you to keep them straight. On the other hand, if all you do with verbs is train conjugations, you will have to mentally run through each conjugation every time you want to use a verb. No, both ways of learning are helpful, and both used together is more efficient than either used separately. We all have preferences for which we like to work on, but let's not set up false dichotomies. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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