July has been a good month for SpanishSense - first we released the SpanishSense Fix, and now we are releasing the first resource that is unique to SpanishSense - Verb Tables.
The rules governing verbs in Spanish are a real advantage for students (although they don’t always feel that way!), because learning a few simple rules gets you communicating in all kinds of situations. To help you see how the rules work, SpanishSense now has reference tables for all the verbs that appear in our lessons.
We’ll use today’s lesson - Let’s Dance - as an example of how you can use it.
First you’d listen to the lesson, read the dialogue and sample sentences, and complete the exercises. You’d learn that ‘avisaré’ means ‘I will tell’ and it derives from the verb ‘avisar - to tell’. But this wouldn’t tell you how to say ‘you will tell’, or ‘they told’, or ‘I would have told’. That’s where the verb tables come in.
All you need to do is;
1) Save the verb ‘avisar’ to your vocab list, either by double clicking the conjugated form ‘avisaré’ in the dialogue,
or by saving the word in the key vocabulary.
2) Then go to your word list, and click the link next to the entry for ‘avisar’.
3) This will open a full conjugation table for this verb, where you can browse all the verbal forms (and find out how to say ‘I will have told’, for example).
中文 Chinese
John Says:
July 26th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
I am not ashamed to say that this is awesome.
I really like it.
I think ChinesePod is going to get conjugation envy.
(OK, probably not.)
admin Says:
July 26th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
What the post doesn’t mention is that in building the tables, we are developing lots of structured conjugation information. We can use this to develop new and powerful exercises and resources that tackle issues specific to Spanish and the other Romance languages. The verb tables are a super resource on their own, but what they will enable in the future is also really exciting.
Bob Mrotek Says:
July 26th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
I would like to make a suggestion based upon personal experience. There are 14 so-called tenses in Spanish, seven simple, and seven compounded with the verb “haber”. There is no need to learn all of them right away and some of them almost never. However, many people who try to speak Spanish never learn any of them and only use the infinitive form of the verb. They sound terrible. In speaking Spanish, the proper use of verbs will separate the sheep from the goats. It is important to start right in on this from the beginning. In my (always humble) opinion one should learn to conjugate automatically the following tenses:
Presente de Indicativo
Imperfecto de Indicativo
Preterito
Futuro
Potencial Simple
Presente de Subjunctivo
Perfecto de Indicativo (con haber)
The first two that I would concentrate on are Presente de Indicativo and Preterito. In my own case I found the only way to accomplish this, especially for irregular verbs, was drilling, drilling, and more drilling. It is like learning your multiplication tables. I found flash cards to be very helpful.
Also, I came across a book that was my salvation. It is called “501 Spanish Verbs” by Christopher Kendris, Ph.D., Barron´s ISBN 0-8120-9282-1. In fact, if you were to buy only one book besides a good Spanish English dictionary like Larousse Standard Mexican Edition ISBN 970-607-993-9 you would do just fine.
Regarding the names of the tenses…don’t get hung up on that. People will argue over Pluscuamperfecto de Indicativo versus Preterito Anterior. Ignore it. Stick with the basic tenses until you get them down good. You will not only be understood but you will be respected.
One other word regarding dictionaries. There are many idiomatic expressions in Spanish and they are fairly regional. Be careful when buying a Spanish English dictionary. Many of the dictionaries are produced in Great Britain and lean toward idiomatic expressions from Spain. If you prefer to learn Latin American Spanish you need to look for a dictionary that leans towards Latin American expressions and slang.
Mexico Bob
FuDaWei Says:
July 27th, 2007 at 5:47 am
Bob, you ol’ perro!!! Glad to see you back, my friend! I was counting on you to pull me through Spanish, ya know.
Steve Says:
July 27th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Bob,
You’re absolutely right about the need to get competent at the verb conjugations. Drilling is one way to get there, but there are other ways we can present the verb forms (embedded in lexical chunks, for instance, and in context) that will also be useful. We’ll be working on this in the coming months.
Also, in terms of drilling, the verb tables are the first step towards things such as flashcards of all the verb forms of common irregular verbs, or a version of The Fix that just drills the imperfect indicative. We have a lot of ideas we want to try out.
Bob Mrotek Says:
July 28th, 2007 at 12:55 am
Steve,
Yes, I believe in lexical chunks also. Let me tell you a story. I arrived in Mexico eight years ago with no Spanish speaking ability other than two years of High School Spanish which I had all but totally forgotten. For the first year I lived in a little town in a parish house with two Catholic priests and NOBODY could speak English. The first morning I was sitting on a curb in front of the parish house waiting for my ride when a little school girl asked me “Que estas haciendo?” (What are you doing?) In panic I whipped out my dictionary and tried to look up “haciendo” not realizing or remembering that haciendo, the gerund form of “hacer” is pronounced without an initial “h” as in “AH-see-en-doh”. I was looking it up under the letter “a” as I had heard it pronounced and couldn’t find it. I will never forget the look on the little girl’s face. She shook her head in disgust. Right then and there I learned that a language when spoken (as opposed to written formally) is built mainly of lexical chunks and idiomatic expressions. I resolved that I would learn to speak by studying these phrases. I put them on 3 X 5 cards and studied them every day. At first they were very simple like: “Are you hungry? Where are you going? You look tired. He is my friend. He already left. Pardon me for the bother.”, etcetera. Little by little I would make them more complex like: “Yesterday, I went to the park but he stayed home.” I studied these phrases until I could instantly recognize them and recall and say them at will without having to think of verb conjugation, sentence pattern, or gender. Believe it or not I collected many of them from the funny papers and comic books because comic books mimic the way average people really talk.
Now, let me say something about drilling and studying versus “absorption”. Many people think that if you move to another country (or listen to recordings) you will automatically learn the language through immersion and adsorption. This simply isn’t true and I think the people at C-Pod can attest to this. I am sure that there are Anglos living in China for years and never seem to get past “Nǐ hǎo”. To learn a language you really have to work at it and it is very hard work. For the first year I used to spend almost every Sunday afternoon scouring the newspaper for words that I didn’t know and looking them up. At first it was almost every word but after a year I could stumble through an article pretty well without having to look up more than a handful of words. To be honest about it, it took me about three years before I actually became comfortable with the language in most circumstances. Talking on the phone, letter writing, and telling jokes were still difficult. I have now reached the point where Spanish and English are just about interchangeable for me and I find myself thinking in Spanish quite a bit. I do a lot of translating for others. However, it was a long hard road and I am not 100 percent there yet and probably will never quite be.
One more or two points more and then I will shut up. There is one more thing that I did that helped me very much and that is reading books in Spanish. The first book that I read was George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” in Spanish. The second was “Confesiones de una Rubia” by Cristina Saralegui. The second was particularly helpful because it addressed the different “flavors” of Spanish used in various countries. In both cases reading these books and looking up the words catapulted my Spanish comprehension a great deal.
Finally, I have come to realize how important it is to study the history and culture at the same time that one is studying the language. You can’t really understand people without getting in their heads and learning the history and culture will help a great deal in knowing why things are said the way they are. For example, in English we say “The walls have ears”, meaning, of course, that someone may be listening. In Mexican Spanish we say “Hay Moros en la costa”…”There are Moors on the coast”, this referring to the Moorish invasion of Spain centuries ago. Just as in Chinese there is a history behind the idiomatic expressions and the more you learn the history the more you will understand the language and even the mood of the speaker.
Saludos,
Mexico bob
P.S. Hi FuDaWei. I would love to help you in any way that I can. Send me a private message from the forum and I will respond. That goes for anyone else who might have a question or two.
Dominic Chambers Says:
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:55 pm
“The rules governing verbs in Spanish are a real advantage for students” … HaHaHaHaHa …. No!
In reality, the rules govering verbs in English are a real advantage for students; you only need to listen to intermediate speakers of English in perfect control of the verbs, and contrast it with intermediate speakers of Spanish, who tend to make a complete pigs ear of it. Spanish beats English as a language in a number of ways, but verb conjugation is not one of them.
juan patricio Says:
October 23rd, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Ah, verbs. Kendrick’s 501 was my best friend in college, but there’s now a pocket version that’s smaller and just as handy. Of course, now I just use the verbix on-line conjugator.
The SpanishSense Verb Table is going to be a nifty feature. The next step might be to design some drills based on the paradigm. One drill might be “Conjugate this verb in the Present Indicative.” Another aspect would be “Conjugate these verbs in the Present Indicative for “nosotros.” And yet another aspect might be “Conjugate this verb in the person/number/tense as prompted.”
And actually, my third year Spanish class really needed to be able to identify conjugated forms in the wild, so an exercise where you either a) name the tense/subject, or b) give an English equivalent… either of those would have saved me a lot of worksheets!
Pa’delante!
fuck ur'self Says:
November 20th, 2007 at 11:15 am
fuk this i just need a table