I constructed a massive deck of German irregular verbs and their conjugations in present and past perfect tenses. I just finished actually doing the deck today to check for any errors since I generated the input with programming and the verbix api (which isn’t great).
It’s a bit of a slog, but I found it super helpful in review. I’ll probably do something similar for regular verbs but without as many conjugations since the rules are well, more regular.
Let me know if you have any feedback or catch any bugs.
Would be curious to see how you attempted … as for the 150 or so irregular verbs there’s around 10 rules, but without an “off-Memrise” site, aka a blog, etc., to explain the rules being applied, Memrise itself doesn’t allow much room to describe the rules or how a user is supposed to answer.
Ouch… @jrsmith17 that appears to be a lot of work. Doing some “Memrise Math”, aka every item requires 6 tests, that means for every verb in Past Perfect one has to do 6 x 9 = 54 tests. At most one should only have to learn present & Präteritum (simple past) of haben and sein plus the past participle of each verb to accomplish the same goal - well actually double it as this gets one the Plusquamperfekt tense also. What you laid out is “better” or maybe “necessary” for Präteritum (simple past) of the verbs, but not Past Perfekt. PP is theoretically the easiest past tense to learn, as one only needs to learn the past participle and the conjugations of haben and sein.
This is not to discourage you, but you might be going down a “wheel spinning” pathway, spending a lot of time, while not learning all that much.
I won’t pretend it wasn’t a lot of work (building it actually didn’t take that long as I automated a lot of it). However, I found myself wishing for some additional features in Memrise. In this case, I wanted Memrise to be able to slot in a nonfixed pronoun into an exercise (e.g. ich habe gestanden oder du hast gestanden). The objective for me here wasn’t necessarily to learn the rule ich habe “something” but require to me to think about using gestanden in different contexts.
Is it strictly necessary? No, absolutely not. But have I found it way more effective for me in terms of keeping the irregular conjugation in my head. I don’t have any plans for doing this for regular verbs because that would definitely be overkill.
Put another way, I’m using this deck less as a learning tool and more as a reinforcement tool. I have seen several of the off memrise blogs/academic pages describing the rules. Those were helpful in terms of initial understanding but didn’t help me reach a point where the rules felt natural (because I had to think about them). The repetition I built here did help me achieve that.
Copy that… I’m one to need repetition as well and wasn’t finding it anywhere either. Memrise is limited on what it can do, as you noted above, and many user created courses try to force it to their needs. Mixing verbs, adjectives and nouns is tenuous at best IMHO. To do what you alluded to above, I actually found Excel to be more helpful - using columns to define Positions I, II, III, etc… Ending in building sentences.
Just as I never found a course that included sein/haben &/or the past participle with a verb to practice from the git-go (not just included as “additional information”) so too it was with plural forms, or combining them with adjectives to get repetition. One can jump around in the course… as currently I’m just expanding with new nouns & adjectives.