12 messages over 2 pages: 1 2
garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5142 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 9 of 12 21 June 2011 at 1:47pm | IP Logged |
I've never had much of a problem learning them; I just seem to learn by example. When you
hear/see them enough in various contexts or example sentences they become quite natural.
Although I still do make mistakes sometimes.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4944 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian
| Message 10 of 12 21 June 2011 at 2:04pm | IP Logged |
Usually there is a limited amount of types of conjugaisons and some irregularities, so once you master these, you'll know how to handle most of the verbs which is quite optimistic. I'd say the key is a lot of practice and exercises. Either from an exercise book or your own (basically creating simple sentences for every verb and form you encounter). But anki can be useful as well, for exemple I have found a wonderful deck of french verbs with nearly all the things you need to learn about verbs.
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| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6020 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin
| Message 11 of 12 21 June 2011 at 3:01pm | IP Logged |
I had to learn the most-used irregular verbs by heart ĂȘtre, avoir, aller, faire. Only rote memorization helped me with these. After that I did a lot of reading on my own and found I was basically only getting half the meaning because I could never tell what tense/person the verb was in. This went on for a long time, but it wasn't so bad since it gave me a lot of necessary exposure to the language.
Then my life got a lot easier after I found Bescherelle. It shows you that if you can conjugation one verb, you can conjugate 30 just like it. It gives you a verb type, tenir for example, and lists all the verbs that are conjugated after it's pattern: retenir, entretenir, devenir, souvenir... The only downside is, it's not a dictionary.
As for the tenses, the biggest rule of thumb for me is to not learn them all at once. I had to learn one before the other. Just an example; I learned the imperfect/l'imparfait first. After l'imparfait I learned futur. Once I had a pretty good idea how to build these tenses it made learning the le conditionnel easy. (Drop the ending off the futur form and added the imparfait-ending.) Here's where it's necessary to have a good resource for grammar. If you check wiki it usually gives a nice explanation for any of the French tenses. --hope that wasn't too long-winded.
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| megazver Triglot Newbie Lithuania Joined 5929 days ago 34 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Lithuanian, Russian*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Polish
| Message 12 of 12 21 June 2011 at 5:45pm | IP Logged |
Jeffers wrote:
Michel Thomas doesn't cover all persons, does he?
And of course that's useful. I was asking what people do. If it works for you, then
it's a useful answer. |
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He doesn't cover vosotros in Spanish, I think. Pretty sure he covered everything in the
French course.
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