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Verb Tense Drills in Anki

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fiziwig
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 Message 9 of 16
09 December 2011 at 7:27pm | IP Logged 
Jeffers wrote:


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.


Point taken. In fact I did first learn the verb tables by rote, so that part is behind me. But it didn't result in fluency, thus the in situ drills. I may have wrongly characterized the tables as useless in my eagerness to promote context drills, so I cheerfully concede your point. In addition, knowing the tables gives you an important resource when faced with having to reason out an unfamiliar verb. :)

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Cavesa
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 Message 10 of 16
10 December 2011 at 10:52pm | IP Logged 
I fully agree with Jeffers.

Learning from context is important and having tons of native input is invaluable but there are things which I just find easier to learn from tables and such sources. It prevents me from getting confused, especially in the beginnings. I see the similarities and differences at once instead of difficult memorisation of every person, even though in a sentence.

And I don't see any difference between memorising the verbs alone or in whole sentences. In both cases it is just a pattern I will use in my own sentences. But for that I need to not stumble upon every verb I encounter.

Edited by Cavesa on 10 December 2011 at 10:55pm
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fiziwig
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 Message 11 of 16
11 December 2011 at 4:23am | IP Logged 
Cavesa wrote:
I fully agree with Jeffers.

Learning from context is important and having tons of native input is invaluable but there are things which I just find easier to learn from tables and such sources. It prevents me from getting confused, especially in the beginnings. I see the similarities and differences at once instead of difficult memorisation of every person, even though in a sentence.

And I don't see any difference between memorising the verbs alone or in whole sentences. In both cases it is just a pattern I will use in my own sentences. But for that I need to not stumble upon every verb I encounter.


I guess for me having the verb form matched up with it's appropriate pronoun makes the association more automatic for me. Maybe it would be just as useful to learn the verb tables but with the pronouns included. Most of the Spanish verbs tables I've seen don't include the pronouns. It's assumed that you know what the first person sigular pronoun is, so why write it again. But for me, drilling on "yo hablaré; tú hablarás;...etc." is far superior to drilling on "1s hablaré; 2s hablarás;...etc.". I think at least that much context is, at the very minimum, vital to improving fluency.

One thing I am discovering as I use the Anki deck I made is that all I really need is the full blown version of at most 2 regular verbs of each type. Once I've mastered a couple of -ar, -ir, and -er verbs the rest of them come naturally. Beyond that I really only need to drill the irregular verbs.

--gary
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Jeffers
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 Message 12 of 16
11 December 2011 at 10:23am | IP Logged 
fiziwig wrote:
Cavesa wrote:
I fully agree with Jeffers.

Learning from context is important and having tons of native input is invaluable but there are things which I just find easier to learn from tables and such sources. It prevents me from getting confused, especially in the beginnings. I see the similarities and differences at once instead of difficult memorisation of every person, even though in a sentence.

And I don't see any difference between memorising the verbs alone or in whole sentences. In both cases it is just a pattern I will use in my own sentences. But for that I need to not stumble upon every verb I encounter.


I guess for me having the verb form matched up with it's appropriate pronoun makes the association more automatic for me. Maybe it would be just as useful to learn the verb tables but with the pronouns included. Most of the Spanish verbs tables I've seen don't include the pronouns. It's assumed that you know what the first person sigular pronoun is, so why write it again. But for me, drilling on "yo hablaré; tú hablarás;...etc." is far superior to drilling on "1s hablaré; 2s hablarás;...etc.". I think at least that much context is, at the very minimum, vital to improving fluency.

One thing I am discovering as I use the Anki deck I made is that all I really need is the full blown version of at most 2 regular verbs of each type. Once I've mastered a couple of -ar, -ir, and -er verbs the rest of them come naturally. Beyond that I really only need to drill the irregular verbs.

--gary


Ugh! I do like using verb tables, but not without the pronouns. When they do that it's like they're assuming were a machine and just need bits of isolated information. Pronounless verb tables are the reason people don't like verb tables. Eeew.
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Cavesa
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 Message 13 of 16
11 December 2011 at 7:20pm | IP Logged 
Have I ever said anything about using tables without pronouns? That would be nonsense. The only tables I have ever seen which used the 1sg, 2sg and not pronouns were for Latin and I had a lot of trouble with those.

I was just speaking about using whole sentences, and a pronoun and verb is not whole sentence, at least most times.
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fiziwig
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 Message 14 of 16
11 December 2011 at 9:13pm | IP Logged 
Cavesa wrote:
Have I ever said anything about using tables without pronouns? That would be nonsense. The only tables I have ever seen which used the 1sg, 2sg and not pronouns were for Latin and I had a lot of trouble with those.

I was just speaking about using whole sentences, and a pronoun and verb is not whole sentence, at least most times.


Ah, the dreaded unspoken assumption. My apologies.

Mostly I was using the book 501 Spanish Verbs as my source of conjugations, and that does not include pronouns in the tables. The tables in the back of "Living Language Ultimate Spanish" also do not include pronouns. Nor are there pronouns in the tables in "Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish", "Teach Yourself Spanish", or in the verb charts in the back of the Barron's Spanish-English dictionary.

So from my personal exposure, Spanish verb tables that include pronouns seem to be rare, or at least uncommon. Maybe I just ended up with an unlucky sample.


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Jeffers
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 Message 15 of 16
11 December 2011 at 9:46pm | IP Logged 
Cavesa wrote:
Have I ever said anything about using tables without pronouns? That would be nonsense. The only tables I have ever seen which used the 1sg, 2sg and not pronouns were for Latin and I had a lot of trouble with those.

I was just speaking about using whole sentences, and a pronoun and verb is not whole sentence, at least most times.


Nobody said you did, Cavesa. But sometimes verb tables are published without pronouns, and we hates em, we do!
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Cavesa
Triglot
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Czech Republic
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 Message 16 of 16
17 December 2011 at 1:30pm | IP Logged 
I didn't know the tables without pronouns were that widely spread in English based resources. I think the Basic German(or whatever):Grammar and workbook series, which I have been using recently, does have the pronouns.

But why do the publishers make such a mistake? Do their authors not have any experience with the tables? Or do they teach students which are comfortable with this kind of tables? Hm, not likely I will ever get any answer.


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